Dr. Yi Zhang
Yi Zhang, PhD, is Senior Investigator in the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, Fred S. Rosen Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also an associate member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Broad Institute.
Dr. Zhang earned his BS and MS in Biophysics from China Agricultural University and his PhD in Molecular Biophysics from Florida State University. He completed postdoctoral training in Dr. Danny Reinberg's lab at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he identified and characterized the Sin3 and NuRD histone deacetylase complexes. He joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999, rising to Kenan Distinguished Professor, before moving his laboratory to Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital in 2012.
Dr. Zhang is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. In April 2026, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of his sustained contributions to the fields of epigenetics and chromatin biology. He was a co-founder of Epizyme and NewStem. His honors include the Gertrude B. Elion Cancer Research Award from the American Association for Cancer Research, the Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and recognition as one of the top 10 most-cited authors in molecular biology and genetics by ScienceWatch.
