Fa Zhang received his Ph.D. degree in 2005 in the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT, CAS). He completed his Ph.D. thesis in Ohio State University as an international exchange student from 2002 to 2005. Then he stayed and worked in ICT as a principal investigator. He is currently an associate professor at ICT.
Research Interests
Dr. Fa Zhang’s research interests include computer algorithms, parallel processing and bioinformatics. His current research concerns computational methods on biological and medical images, in particular image processing and reconstruction of Cryo-electron microscopy and super-resolution optical microscopy.
Dr. Zhang’s group developed several methods and software packages in Cryo-EM, including image alignment software Markerauto and reconstruction software ICON, which have been used in Institute of Biophysics, CAS, Tsinghua University, UCSD, and helped biologists to obtain some significant biological discoveries.
Cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) is increasingly becoming the premier method for determining the three-dimensional (3D) structure of protein complexes and viruses at molecular resolution. Recent significant technical breakthroughs in both hardware equipment and reconstruction algorithms promise to increase the speed of imageprocessing and to improve the resolution of structures that Cryo-EM can be achieved. In this report, we will brief review the current status of Cryo-EM 3D Reconstruction and address the technical challenges in Cryo-EM from a computational point of view. Also, we will introduce briefly the research of our group in this field.