She received her bachelors degree in biochemistry from Nanjing University, China and her PhD in chemical engineering from University of California, Los Angeles with an honor. She is the author of over 40 original journal articles for her research and was named Pew Scholar in 2012. Dr. Zhangs laboratory is studying natural product biosynthesis and engineering for applications in bioenergy and medicine. The research themes include genome mining for new bioactive small molecule and enzyme discovery, pathway enzyme identification and characterization, pathway design toward combinatorial natural product biosynthesis and biofuel production, as well as biological function characterization of natural products.