Appointments:
Associate Professor, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division, Fred Hutch
Research Associated Professor, University of Washington Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology
Faculty Profile

Dr. Zhu has spent most of her career focused on understanding intricate interactions between HSV and the local immune responses in human skin. Early on she developed novel laboratory tools to detect how immune cells behave in genital tissues during the active and latent phases of herpes infection. These pivotal studies elucidated the underlying mechanisms of immune surveillance and rapid containment of tissue resident memory T cells (TRM) in peripheral tissue, as well as, mechanisms of their activation and retention at the barrier surfaces. They also provided a plausible explanation of how HSV-2 infection impacts the risk of HIV infection and why HSV-2 antiviral therapy fails to reduce HIV acquisition in HSV infected individuals. The study of the tissue microenvironment during HSV-2 reactivation has led to the understanding of how keratinocytes, through production of IL-17c, act on its receptor IL17RA/RE to protect and stimulate the peripheral nerve system in human skin. Most recently, her team has developed an in vitro organ-level, biomimetic ‘Skin-on-Chip’ platform with vascular perfusion for modeling host immune responses to HSV and for drug screening. She has developed several research partnerships and her group is highly collaborative.

Zhu received a Bachelor of Sciences in the Department of Biochemical Engineering, East China University of Chemical Technology, Shanghai, P.R. China and her PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Shanghai, P.R. China. She did her post graduate training at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, and Harvard Medical School. Zhu joined the Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of Washington in 2003 and the Hutchinson Center in 2006.

In her spare time, Zhu enjoys cooking, reading, hiking and traveling.