2023 Irene Ferrer Awardee, Columbia University
Dr. Hanrui Zhang is a macrophage biologist. She completed her PhD training in 2011 at the University of Missouri. Her graduate work centered on the crosstalk between immune cells and blood vessels in diabetes-associated vascular diseases. Her postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania continued to address the mechanisms of cardiometabolic diseases focusing on macrophage lipid metabolism and inflammation using gene targeting in human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) with differentiation to macrophages.
The Zhang laboratory in the Department of Medicine – Cardiology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center seeks to understand the dynamic role of macrophages in cardiometabolic diseases to find novel mechanisms and new treatments. The laboratory applies technologies for high-throughput functional genomics, human iPSC and CRISPR gene editing, transgenic mouse models, human genetics, and a variety of cell and molecular techniques.