Faculty Member
Assistant Professor
Department of Physiology
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Physiology
Center for Health Sciences, 53-320
630 Charles E Young Dr S,
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Biography
Chuchu Zhang, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She then received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, where she worked with Dr. David Julius studying pain-producing toxins from venomous animals. Her work utilized these natural toxins to identify and manipulate pain-related signal transduction machineries in sensory neurons. Afterwards, she carried out her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Stephen Liberles at Harvard Medical School, where she started her independent trajectory to study nausea. She focused on a brain structure, the area postrema, which mediates nausea responses to several visceral threats. Her work has uncovered fundamental aspects of the area postrema, including cell types, receptors, and nausea-related neural circuits. The Zhang Lab opens in September 2023 at UCLA.
Faculty Member
Research Interests
Dr. Loes Olde Loohuis’ research focuses on elucidating the underlying molecular mechanisms of severe mental illness, in particular schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, by utilizing and developing computational approaches to leverage multi-level data (including psychiatric phenotypes, health records and molecular phenotypes).