Dr. Zhenyu Cheng

Zhenyu Cheng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University. His lab has been focusing on the study of host–bacterial interactions. He studied plant-growth-promoting Pseudomonas species using proteomics tools during his graduate studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. After obtaining his Ph.D. degree in 2010, he went to Boston for his postdoctoral position that was jointly appointed in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His postdoctoral research identified a novel immune signaling pathway in plants that detects bacterially secreted proteases. During his postdoctoral training, he received a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Government of Canada, followed by a Tosteson Medical Discovery Award from Harvard Medical School. He started his independent research lab at Dalhousie University in 2016. He is a recipient of Dalhousie President’s Research Excellence Awards for Emerging Investigators, Cystic Fibrosis Canada Martha Morton Early Career Award, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research Bhagirath Singh Early Career Prize in Infection and Immunity.