Sisi (Sijin) Zheng

Sisi was born in Guangzhou, China and raised in Birmingham, Alabama.

She attended New York University where she majored in Biochemistry and minored in Math and Psychology. During her time, she was involved in the chemistry department and served as a peer tutor for general chemistry and biochemistry. She worked in Professor Nathaniel Trasseth's lab studying pathological mutations in the kinase domain of FGF receptors, using solution state NMR techniques to probe and characterize how these mutations allosterically lead to aberrant kinase activation. After graduation, she continued to work on this project and started work towards an NMR solution structure of Grb2, a downstream FGFR kinase substrate.

At Yale, she is involved in MD/PhD and MD admissions, Graduate Student Assembly, Medical Student Council (currently serving as a Class Representative and previously as President), BioMed Amgen Scholars Anatomy Program, Yale School of Mileage (the YSM run club), and Ultrasounds (the YSM acapella group). She has also served as the iPro Student Director and the LCME Student Liason.

Research wise, she is interested in the intersection between chemical and structural biology, specifically structure guided drug design. She is completing her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology in Professor Craig Crews' lab using targeted protein degradation technology to expand the druggable proteome.

In her free time, she likes to bake and cook, run, bike, hike, and travel.