Sixue Zhang, Ph.D.

Head of A.I. Drug Discovery

Sixue Zhang, Ph.D., has more than 10 years of experience in computer-aided drug discovery. He obtained a Ph.D. of computational chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the J. & M. Witt Fellowship under the supervision of Prof. Sharon Hammes-Schiffer. Since joining Southern Research, Dr. Zhang has collaborated with more than 20 multidisciplinary teams from both academia and industry for more than 50 drug discovery projects covering oncology, neurology, infectious diseases, and other therapeutic areas.

His team is part of Southern Research’s integrated Design-Make-Test-Analyze drug discovery platform. His team leverages latest artificial intelligence and next-generation molecular modeling technology to facilitate drug discovery pipelines from therapeutic target discovery all the way to clinical stage. For example, aided by AI models developed with vast in-house assay data, his team quickly discovered highly potent novel antiviral inhibitors that otherwise would take years to discover. Besides, Dr. Zhang serves in editorial board of scientific journals, professional committees, as well as speakers in national and international conferences.