Dr. Zhang received her PhD. in neurobiology at Columbia University. In 2000, she joined David Sulzer's laboratory for postdoctoral training, with a focus on the presynaptic interaction of the glutamatergic and dopaminergic neurotransmissions. Currently she is an assistant professor in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry, and also the director of Optical Imaging Facility of Movement Disorder Division at Columbia Medical School. Dr. Zhang's research interests include the genetic and neurobiological basis of neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. Specifically, she wants to understand information processing in the motor and reward learning circuits at the synaptic and molecular levels. Her work seeks to explain the modulation and plasticity of dopamine release, and she demonstrated the frequency dependent modulation of dopamine release by nicotine. She specializes in electrochemical methods (i.e., fast scan voltammetry and amperometry) and optical approaches (i.e., two-photon imaging) that record the release of dopamine in living brain slices.