Yale scientist leaves for China university, says Chinese scholars can’t lead major research in US

“In the U.S., it is almost impossible for a Chinese scholar to take the lead on this project,” Zhang, who is building an ultra-large-scale cellular structure group data bank with unprecedented precision, told China Science Dailythe official newspaper of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in a March 26 interview.

Zhang, an assistant professor in Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, is among a growing number of Chinese-born scientists leaving top Western institutions for positions in China, drawn by expanding research funding, state-of-the-art facilities, and the promise of leading large-scale projects that they say remain out of reach for ethnic Chinese researchers in the U.S.

His departure on Jan. 12 came just weeks before a paper for which he was the corresponding author appeared in the journal Nature on Feb. 18. The study, co-led with Qinhui Rao of Nanjing Medical University, challenges the prevailing model of how cells assemble the machinery that transports cargo along their internal scaffolding.

For over a decade, scientists believed that adaptor proteins played the central role in assembling the dynein-dynactin complex, the molecular motor responsible for moving organelles and other cargo inside cells.

Zhang’s team found that microtubules themselves serve as the primary assembly platform. Dynein and dynactin spontaneously form a stable complex on the microtubule surface even without adaptor proteins, which join the complex afterward, according to a Nanjing Medical University summary of the research.

The finding redefines the role of microtubules from passive tracks to active organizers of the transport system, with potential implications for understanding neurological disorders, reproductive diseases, and other conditions linked to dynein dysfunction.

Zhang’s path to one of the world’s most competitive research fields began in a rural area of Shaanxi Province in northwestern China. In 2004, he entered Harbin Institute of Technology, graduating four years later with a degree in biotechnology before joining the Institute of Biophysics at CAS for his PhD in biophysics, which he completed in 2013, according to his institutional biography.

It was at CAS that Zhang first encountered cryo-EM, an imaging technique that flash-freezes biological samples to reveal their molecular architecture at near-atomic resolution. The field would define his career.

In 2014, Zhang moved to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, one of the birthplaces of structural biology. There he produced a string of high-profile papers, including a 2015 cover story in Science on the structure of the dynactin complex and a 2017 Cell paper revealing how human dynein is auto-inhibited and activated.

He established his own lab at Yale in 2019 and continued to push the boundaries of cryo-EM. In 2024, working with Zhu Jiapeng of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, he published a Nature paper that demonstrated a way to image intact mitochondria at near-atomic resolution without first purifying the proteins inside them, according to Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. The technique allowed researchers to observe proteins in their natural cellular environment for the first time.

“It seems that in the past, it was staged photography, but now it is candid photography,” Zhu said, according to the South China Morning Post. “Unintentional candid shots help us obtain a more authentic, accurate and reliable form of proteins.”

Despite his productivity at Yale, Zhang chose not to wait for promotion and returned to China, joining USTC’s Division of Life Sciences and Medicine.

“The USTC is a simple, pure, passionate and idealistic research environment,” he told China Science Daily. “The USTC leaders are true scientists who are very supportive of young scholars.”

His long-term goal remains what first captivated him as a graduate student: observing the atomic details of life as it happens inside living cells.

“I do not know how long this matter will take, but I have enough confidence to accomplish it,” he said.