Dr. Zhu received his MD degree from the Soochow University School of Medicine and PhD degree from the University of Saskatchewan. He completed his postdoctoral training in psychiatry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1998. Then, he joined the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard University School of Medicine as an instructor in 1999. In November 2000, he returned to the University of Mississippi Medical Center as an assistant professor and in 2007 joined the Department of Pharmacology at East Tennessee State University as an associate professor. Dr. Zhu’s research has been focused on gene regulation in the central noradrenergic system under psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. His laboratory has found that the transcriptional factors such as Phox2 have modulatory effects on the expression of noradrenergic phenotypes in the brains of pre-clinical models, which may have impact on pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases including PD.