Chun-Li Zhang, PhD, is currently an endowed W.W. Caruth Jr. Scholar in Biomedical Research and an assistant professor at UT Southwestern. He was trained on transcriptional regulation of cell behavior and molecular and cellular neuroscience. His research focuses on adult neurogenesis, neural plasticity, neural degeneration and regeneration.

Dr. Zhang’s laboratory recently demonstrated that differentiated glial cells can be reprogrammed into neural progenitors and functionally mature neurons in the adult brain and spinal cord, raising the possibility of using a patient’s own cells for regenerative therapy without the need of cell transplantation. Dr. Zhang was a winner of the New Innovator Award of the National Institutes of Health and is a New Scholar in Aging of the Ellison Medical Foundation.