Kexin Zhang

Kexin Zhang joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Her research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational structural biology, and cryo-electron microscopy.  

Zhang received her PhD in Chemistry and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan, where she used machine learning and experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data to model RNA structures. She completed postdoctoral training in Nikolaus Grigorieff’s lab at UMass Chan Medical School, where she developed computational cryo-EM methods for detecting and reconstructing small and challenging molecular targets.  

At Yale, Zhang’s group will build new theories, algorithms, and software for turning noisy cryo-EM and cryo-ET data into molecular insight. By developing methods for visual proteomics and in situ structural biology, the lab aims to study molecular machines directly in cells and understand how their structures, interactions, and conformational states shape biological functions.