Yale School of Medicine Special Lecture

We are pleased to welcome Zeda Zhang, PhD, to the Yale School of Medicine to present “Target Dynamic Tumor States with Engineered Immunity."

Dr Zhang is an HMI/Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He received his undergraduate degree from Sun Yat-sen University and trained at the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS) with Dr. Xiaodong Wang. He earned his PhD at MSKCC in the laboratory of Dr. Charles Sawyers, studying mechanisms of drug resistance in prostate cancer, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at MSKCC working with Drs. Scott Lowe and Michel Sadelain. His research focuses on how dynamic cell-surface remodeling shapes pathological cell states across the tumor ecosystem and how these insights can be translated into cellular immunotherapies. His recent work published in Cell identified a convergent uPAR+ tumor ecosystem that drives immunosuppression in solid tumors and demonstrated the efficacy of uPAR-targeted CAR T cells in preclinical models.