Dr. Zhou currently works as a Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB). His research explores the host response during acute and prolonged exposure to Borrelia burgdorferi — the pathogen that causes Lyme disease — with an emphasis on acute-phase proteins and proteins predominantly expressed in organs and tissues affected during Borrelia infection.
Dr. Zhou has contributed to a number of different biomarker discovery projects at ISB involving central nervous system diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as other conditions such as preterm birth, steatosis, drug-induced liver injuries, toxoplasmosis and, more recently, Lyme disease. He developed a novel approach to biomarker discovery that detects and measures the abundance of proteins in the blood of specific organs, which reflects the health of those organs.