Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China in 1997, and completed his post-doctoral fellowships at the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Zhang received his Harvard Medical School Instructor appointment in 2004, and he currently holds faculty appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, as well as in the Center for Space Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine.
Dr. Zhang has extensive experience in biomedical optics, electronics and imaging science and technology, and more than 20 years of experience designing, developing and testing novel wearable or ambulatory medical devices, and his current research interests include prevention of cardiovascular and cerebral vascular diseases (CVDs, such as heart attacks and strokes), and body-mind medicine. Dr. Zhang’s research experience and contributions include:
1. Invention of wearable multimodality cuffless blood pressure monitoring, which integrates multiple cuffless BP technologies, novel BP measurement modeling, multi-modality algorithms, and the latest wearable computing technology into a pair of eyeglasses, to enable beat-to-beat continuous BP monitoring, seamless automatic integration with EHR to meet today’s need of BP control and prevention of cerebral vascular diseases.
2. Invention of wearable functional neuroimaging, which enables monitoring and imaging of brain function (via cerebral hemodynamics) during a person’s daily activities. Systemic hemodynamics, ECG, EEG, motion (actigraphy) and other key parameters can be simultaneously recorded as needed. This technology has significant potential for the prevention, diagnosis, and management of CVDs.
3. Development of novel signal processing algorithms for systemic physiological interference removal in optical functional brain imaging, which significantly enhanced the sensitivity and specificity of brain function measurement using near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and diffuse optical imaging (DOI).
4. Development of novel imaging and monitoring systems including the Tomographic Optical Breast Imaging system (TOBI), and invention of multi-modality imaging fusion algorithms. Dr. Zhang has many patents and publications, his work has been cited about 1500 times according to the SCI Report.
Dr. Zhang is currently the Director of the NSG Biomedical Engineering Lab, and has mentored over twenty students, post-docs and visiting professors. Dr. Zhang serves as a reviewer for numerous journals including Academic Radiology, Optics Letters, Journal of Biomedical Optics, Journal of Electronic Imaging and Applied Optics.