Dr. Zhao completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Chemistry at Shandong University where he studied polymer, surface and colloidal chemistry. In 2008, he received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry at McMaster University, where he focused on the use of functional nucleic acid to structure gold nanoparticles to construct well-defined nanostructures and biosensors. Dr. Zhao then completed a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MIT. Dr. Zhao received the MIT’s Technology Review TR35 Award: the world’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35 in 2012. Dr. Zhao’s current research focuses on the development of novel molecular, nano- and micro-engineered tools for stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine, diagnosis and in vivo imaging, and elucidating stem cell and cancer biology.