Dr. Ming-Ming Zhou is an internationally recognized expert in NMR spectroscopy of protein structure-function and structure-based small-molecule design. He received his PhD degree in Chemistry from Purdue University in 1993 and performed postdoctoral study at Abbott Laboratories before joining Mount Sinai School of Medicine as a faculty member in 1997. His research interests are directed at (1) structure and mechanisms of epigenetic gene regulation and histone-directed chromatin biology; (2) structure-based small molecule design; and (3) mechanism-based disease biology and drug discovery in HIV/AIDS, cancers, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Zhou's contributions in his area of research include structure-guided functional discovery of the conserved bromodomain as an acetyl-lysine binding domain (Nature 1999), and the PAZ domain as a conserved RNA binding domain (Nature 2003), both of which have broad implications in epigenetic chromatin biology and RNA interference. His work in rational design of chemical probes for mechanism-driven research is demonstrated by his discovery of the HIV Tat/human co-activator PCAF interaction as a potential novel anti-HIV therapy target (Mol. Cell 2002; JACS 2005), for which he received the Glaxo/Smith Kline Drug Discovery & Development Award in 2003. Recently, Dr. Zhou has developed novel small-molecule probes that modulate the transcriptional activity of human tumor suppressor p53 in DNA damage repair (Chem. & Biol. 2006).