Xiaokan Zhang

Research Interests:

Kinase signaling in iPSC-derived Cardiomyocytes and Engineered Cardiac Tissue

Education:

B.S. in Biological Science, Nankai University, Tianjin, China, 2008

Ph.D in Biochemistry, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, 2014

Xiaokan received her PhD degree at Hunter College, City University of New York, where she worked on mechanisms of transcriptional control and regulation in mammalian cells. Then she conducted postdoctoral research at Columbia University, on the effect of mitochondrial enzyme acetylation and metabolism on cardiac function in human cardiovascular diseases, especially in heart failure.

She joined Prof. Vunjak-Novakovic laboratory working with Dr. Barry Fine in 2019. Her major research project is to investigate the mechanism behind how STK25 regulates the cardiac signaling pathways in human cardiovascular diseases and to demonstrate the physiologic significance of that regulation in cellular based assays using human inducible pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes as a model.