Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist, and the David B. Arnold Junior. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Education
Zhuang graduated from the USTC with a Bachelor of Surgery in Physics in 1991. She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996 and conducted her thesis research under the supervision of Doctor Yuen-Ron Shen.
Career
Xiaowei Zhuang is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. In 1997-2001, she was a Chodorow Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Doctor Steven Chu at Stanford University. She started her faculty position in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Department of Physics at Harvard University in 2001. Zhuang’s laboratory invented Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a single-molecule-based super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method.
The Zhuang laboratory demonstrated three-dimensional super-resolution imaging with STORM. The Zhuang laboratory also discovered several photoswitchable dye molecules that enabled STORM imaging and demonstrated live-cell STORM imaging.
Using STORM, Zhuang and colleagues have studied a variety of biological system, ranging from single-cell organisms to complex brain tissues. These studies led to the discovery of novel cellular structures, such as the periodic membrane skeletons in the axons of neurons and provided insights into many other cellular structures.
The Zhuang laboratory invented a single-cell transcriptome imaging method, MERFISH (multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization), which allows numerous Ribonucleic acid species to be imaged and quantified in single cells in their native context. Zhuang and colleagues used single-molecule FRET to study biomolecules and molecular complexes and developed single-virus tracking methods to study virus-cell interactions.
2015: Foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Membership
National Academy of Sciences.