Biography

Haiqing Zhao has deep interests in studying biological complexity with physics, chemistry and computational methods. He received his PhD in Biophysics, where he studied histone assembly through a partnership program between the University of Maryland and NIH/NCI, working with Dr. Garegin Papoian and Dr. Yamini Dalal. His thesis works calculated the folding and binding free energies of histone oligomers, revealing the folding principles of histones and nucleosome through multi-scale molecular dynamics simulations. During his postdoc with Dr. Barry Honig at Columbia Medical School, Dr. Zhao transitioned to Systems Biology. He developed machine learning methods to predict genome-wide protein-protein interactions, delivering the pairwise protein-protein interactome database of human and of E. coli. These works laid the foundation for his current research lab at UTMB. He joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Sealy Center for Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics in the Fall of 2024.

Research

Research in the Zhao lab focuses on Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) using computational approaches that span both molecular biophysics and systems biology. On the molecular biophysics end, we employ multi-scale molecular dynamics simulations to calculate binding free energy, and their changes due to mutations and post-translation modifications. From systems biology perspective, we develop and apply ML/AI tools to study PPI networks on genome-wide scale. The mission of our lab is to combine these approaches to 1) understand disease mechanisms by leveraging the predicted PPI networks, and 2) identify key disease-related proteins to target for mutation, vaccine, or drug design. We are particularly interested in studying host-pathogen interactions and epigenetics. For more details, please refer to our lab website. Lastly, please feel free to email us (hazhao@utmb.edu) for collaborations or interests in joining our team.