Xinyan Zhang, MD, PhD

During my early stage of graduate study, as really interested in all kinds of diseases, on the one hand, my first research project was closely related with the clinical disease. I investigated the role of adipokines in Kawasaki disease, which is one of the important autoimmune diseases in children. In this study, I found that adipokines including chemerin, omentin-1 and adiponectin are closely associated with the early inflammation and lipid metabolism disorders of acute Kawasaki disease. On the other hand, I have the chance to explore the mechanism of meta-inflammation, which is a very intriguing point about the chronic inflammation in obese children.

When it came to the senior year of my graduate, under the mentorship of my advisor Dr. Feng Fang, who is a great pediatrician in infectious disease, as well as another mentor Ming Zhang in Augusta University, I focused on the interaction of autophagy, cell death and cytomegalovirus infection using in vitro cell culture model and in vivo mice model. I found that the interplay between autophagy and cell death is actually very interesting and complicated, and the immune response was involved in this process. Also, using caspase-12, which is classified as inflammatory caspase, complete knockout mice model, we found that caspase-12 contributes to caspase-3-dependent and independent retinal bystander cell death during MCMV retinitis. Based on these research experiences, I have learnt so much about how to do a research project and how to write a scientific article. Most importantly, what interests me more is the complicated molecular details of these phenotypes and the signal pathway of how it happened.