• Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering
Xuejun Zhu

Educational Background

  • Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 2019
  • Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Wyss Institute - 2019
  • Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley - 2017
  • B.S., Biosciences (DII), Nanjing University, China - 2012

Research Interests

    • Natural product biosynthesis
    • Xenobiotic metabolism
    • Biochemistry
    • Enzymology
    • Microbial systems
    • Biomolecular engineering
    • Secretion systems
    • Synthetic biology
     

Awards & Honors

  • Dean of Engineering Excellence Award (Assistant Professor Level), TEES, 2024
  • Engineering Genesis Award, TEES, 2023
  • Maximizing Investigators' Research Award for Early Stage Investigators, National Institutes of Health – 2022
  • Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, The Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering – 2022

Selected Publications

  • Gordils-Valentin, L., Ouyang, H., Qian, L., Hong, J., Zhu, X.*, Conjugative type IV secretion systems enable bacterial antagonism that operates independently of plasmid transfer. Commun. Biol., 2024, 7, 499.
  • Ouyang, H., Xu, Z., Hong, J., Malroy, J., Qian, L., Ji, S., Zhu, X.*, “Mining the Metabolic Capacity of Clostridium sporogenes Aided by Machine Learning”, Angew. Chem., 2024, e202319925.
  • Qian, L., Mohanty, P., Jayaraman, A., Mittal, J., Zhu, X.*, “Specific residues and conformational plasticity define the substrate specificity of short-chain dehydrogenases/reductases”, J. Biol. Chem. 2024., 300(1), 105596.
  • Qian, L., Ouyang, H., Gordils-Valentin, L., Hong, J., Jayaraman, A.*, Zhu, X.* “Identification of Gut Bacterial Enzymes for Keto-Reductive Metabolism of Xenobiotics” ACS Chem. Biol., 2022, 17(7), 1665–1671.
  • Ouyang, H., Hong, J., Malroy, J., Zhu, X.* "An E. coli-Based Biosynthetic Platform Expands the Structural Diversity of Natural Benzoxazoles" ACS Synth. Biol., 2021, 10(9), 2151–2158.