Staff Scientist
Education:
M.D., Beijing Medical University
M.Math., Bioinformatics, University of Waterloo
B.S., Computer Science and Statistics, University of Manitoba
Biography
Fengkai Zhang is a staff scientist in the Computational Systems Biology Section. He received his M.D. from Beijing Medical University, his B.S. in computer science and statistics from the University of Manitoba, and his master’s degree in bioinformatics from the University of Waterloo. His postdoctoral work at Virginia Commonwealth University focused on SNPs in human and mouse. Following his training in bioinformatics analysis, he worked as research faculty for the PATRIC (Pathosystems Resource Integration Center) project in the NIAID Bioinformatics Research Center (BRC) at Virginia Tech.
Within the Computational Systems Biology Section of the LISB/NIAID, Dr. Zhang is one of the main developers of the Simmune project. He developed the Simmune Modeler, creating an iconographical language for rule-based modeling and tools for visualizing spatially resolved simulations. His recent work involves the development of approaches for analyzing model parameter space. He manages the build systems of the Simmune software suite across multiple operating systems including Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. Dr. Zhang also leads an international community effort in establishing and releasing the systems biology standard, SBML-multi (Systems Biology Markup Language Level 3 Package Specification for Multistate, Multicomponent and Multicompartment Species). He served as an SBML editor from 2017 to 2019. Outside the lab, he enjoys playing tennis and basketball.