Yining Zhu, PhD, is a Schmidt Science Fellow and postdoctoral scholar in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. His research focuses on engineering lipid nanoparticle and biomaterial platforms to improve nucleic acid delivery, immune modulation, and cancer immunotherapy. He received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, where he developed high-throughput in vivo screening strategies to identify lipid nanoparticles that can tune immune responses and enhance mRNA vaccine efficacy. Dr. Zhu’s work integrates nanomedicine, immunoengineering, spatial proteomics, and machine learning to understand how nanoparticle design shapes delivery, translation, and immune activation across tissues. His research has contributed to multiple first-author and co-first-author publications in leading journals, including Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, Biomaterials, Nature Chemical Engineering, and Science Advances. He has also been recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Science, a Siebel Scholar, and a Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator finalist. At Duke, Dr. Zhu is developing spatially resolved platforms to map lipid nanoparticle delivery and immune responses in vivo, with the goal of designing more effective mRNA vaccines and immunotherapies, particularly for cancer and age-associated immune dysfunction.