CONTACT INFORMATION

Mailing Address: 2252 Louis Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94303

E-mail: clark.x.zhang@gmail.com

Phone: 646-894-5291

EDUCATION

High School: Hunter College High School; Class of 2005

College: Columbia College, Columbia University; Class of 2009

1. College Degree: B.A. in Biology

2. Cumulative GPA: 3.93

Medical Education: Stanford School of Medicine; Entering Class of 2009

LEADERSHIP AND TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Tutor; Palo Alto Area, California (Since November, 2010)

I’ve tutored middle-school, high-school, college, and post-college students in a variety of subjects including middle-school and high-school math; middle-school biology; high-school biology and chemistry; college biochemistry and organic chemistry; SAT verbal and writing; and MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) physics, general chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, and verbal. I’ve helped a middle-school student improve from a B- to A- math student and a high-school student improve from C to B in chemistry. In two weeks of tutoring, I helped a college student improve from a 6 (32^nd percentile) to a 10 (68^th percentile) on the MCAT. I've helped these students and many others enjoy the subjects in which I tutored them. For the non-standardized-test subjects, I’ve not only helped students with ongoing courses during the school year but have also helped students for upcoming courses over the summer.

Coordinator; Harlem Restoration Project, Community Impact, Columbia University (2007-2009)

Every week about 6 of us volunteers took about 20 kids aged 5 to 14 on trips to educational places (museums, the zoo) as well to activities (bowling, skating). We taught the kids everything from art history to climate change on our museum trips, as well helped them with homework, projects, and middle-school and high-school applications.

As one of two coordinators, I also had the job of planning the trips, communicating the info to other volunteers and the parents of our kids, recruiting prospective volunteers, and representing HRP to Community Impact (CI). CI is an oversight, fundraising, and advisory organization for all the community service groups at Columbia University

WORK EXPERIENCE

Special Assistant to the President, Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, New York (Summer 2006)

· Innovest is the largest independent research firm for socially responsible investment (SRI), supply funds and independent investors with information related to SRI

· My activities at Innovest included

o Assisting the president, directors, and analysts in developing pitches for screening for morally objectionable activity (e.g., weapons manufacturing) for fund managers

o Writing activity-screening reports

o Preparing data for publication in the 2006 Global Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) report, the world’s pre-eminent report on how corporations are dealing with the prospect of climate change and reform in the regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions, and the 2006 Canadian CDP report, as requested by the president, in-house analysts, and analysts at the Conference Board of Canada

o Developing a Microsoft Access® data warehouse for partly automatic activity screening, with the assistance of I.T. specialists, analysts, and the president

PUBLICATIONS

1. Forouhar, F., Neely, H., Zhang, X-Z., Price II, W.N., Hussain, M., Seetharaman, J., Xiao, R., Conover, K., Cunningham, K., Ma, L-C., Ho, C.K., Everett, J.K., Acton, T.B., Montelione, G.T., Hunt, J.F., Tong, L.

Crystal structure of 4-hydroxybutyrate CoA-transferase (abfT-2) from Porphyromonas gingivalis. PDB ID: 3d3u.

PRESENTATIONS

1. Enhancing by Protein Crystallization by Surface-Residue Substitution With Phenylalanine and Glycine. Poster Presentation at the Columbia Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium, January 2009.

2. Enhancing by Protein Crystallization by Surface-Residue Substitution With Phenylalanine and Glycine. Talk at Amgen Scholars Discussion Group, July 2008.

AWARDS

1. Columbia Biology Department Honors; May 2009.

2. Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia University Chapter; May 2009.

3. Magna cum laude; May 2009

4. Amgen Scholars Program grant to study protein crystallization, Summer 2008.

5. Student travel grant to the Cullen Trust Symposium on Translational Research, Texas Medical Center, January 2008.

6. Columbia University Dean’s List, Every Quarter of College (September 2005-June 2009).

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

1) Summer 2007 and 2008; John Hunt Lab (Member of the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium), Columbia University

The formation of crystals that give high-resolution diffraction is a major limiting step in the determination of protein structure by X-ray crystallography. A study (Nicholson et al. 2009) has been recently published that is the first statistical study of crystallization with a large and systematically generated data set; this study has revealed that quality crystallization correlates to the percentage of surface residues that are phenylalanine and glycine. This correlation suggests the technique of substitution with phenylalanine and glycine to enhance crystallization. If effective, this technique would be an alternative to alanine substitution, which has been previously shown to enhance crystallization.

To confirm the effectiveness of this technique and to compare its effectiveness to that of alanine substitution, we have attempted to create, purify, and crystallize four triplets of alanine, phenylalanine, and glycine mutants of P. gingivalis 4-hydroxybutyrate CoA-transferase. This protein gave only low-resolution diffraction previous to our study. Each of our triplets of mutants consists of three mutants that have a single wildtype surface residue replaced with alanine, phenylalanine, and glycine respectively. We have found that the mutants do not form crystals or near-crystalline structures in more vapor-diffusion conditions than the wildtype but rather in approximately the same number of conditions. This preliminary result does not support our hypothesis that phenylalanine and glycine substitution enhances crystallization. We have also solved the structure of both the wildtype protein and a glycine mutant. The glycine-mutant structure has a higher resolution, supporting our hypothesis, but the introduced glycine is not located within the crystal-packing contact though it is near. Thus, it is unclear how the introduced glycine altered the crystallization behavior of the protein. Follow-up efforts to determine the structures of other mutants have been planned to obtain more interpretable structures in which the mutant residues mediate crystal packing.

2) Spring 2008; Dr. Alice Heicklen’s Project Lab in Cell and Developmental Biology, Columbia University

The GATA-4 gene and its cis-regulatory regions are believed to be a key node in the gene regulatory network for the specification of the cardiac progenitor field in vertebrates. Two cis regulatory regions have been previously identified that drive zebrafish GATA-4 expression in the heart. One of these region has been shown to contain T-box, GATA, and Nkx2.5 binding sites, and the T-box sites have been shown to be functionally active enhancers. We have used transfection and luficerase assays in C2C12 cells to test for direct interaction between the two GATA-4 regulatory regions and Tbx20, GATA-4, GATA-5, and Nkx2.5, each by itself and in paris and triplets. We report that GATA-4, GATA-5, and Tbx20 cooperatively activate GATA-4 expression, each transcription factor being necessary for the full activation effect of the triplet. The specification of this activation effect and similar effects in the lateral plate mesoderm regions where both GATA-4 and GATA-5 are strongly expressed may be the function of the previously observed intricate and partly overlapping patterns of GATA-4 and GATA-5 expression. We also report that GATA-4 and Nkx2.5 as well as GATA-5 and Nkx2.5 cooperatively activate GATA-4 expression, just their orthologs Pannier and Tinman cooperatively activate Mef2 in Drosophila. This parallel between zebrafish and drosophila development augments the evidence that the gene regulatory network for cardiac-field specification is conserved in all bilaterians.

3) Fall 2007; Clinical Research Program, Emergency Department, Roosevelt Hospital, New York

We conducted a variety of observational and interventional clinical studies. Two studies were a test in New York of the San Francisco syncope rule for predicting patients with short-term serious outcomes and a test of novel iodinated analogue of 123-phenylpentadecanoic acid designed for greater absorptivity by non-ischemic tissues for SPECT imaging of myocardial ischemia. My duties were to identify patients eligible for the studies and to consent them into the studies. Both studies are still in progress.

LANGUAGES

Mandarin: Fluent in oral and written Mandarin

Spanish: Proficient in oral and written Spanish