ME Leads the Way: Meet Postdoc Li Zhan

ME Postdoc Li Zhan is using the skills he learned during his doctoral study at UMN ME to improve human health.

Li Zhan began his doctoral study in 2014, under Professor John Bischof. Zhan became a Doctoral Dissertation Fellow — an award given to the University's most accomplished PhD candidates — and completed his degree in 2020. He then became a postdoc in Bischof's BioHeat Mass Transfer Lab to continue the important work he began as a PhD candidate. That work was recently published in two significant articles:

1) Advanced Science — "Conduction Cooling and Plasmonic Heating Dramatically Increase Droplet Vitrification Volumes for Cell Cryopreservation"
IMPACT: Zhan and his co-authors' ice-free cryopreservation approach demonstrates a proof-of-concept solution for the supply chain of off-the-shelf cell products in cell therapy and regenerative medicine applications. 

2) Nature Communications — "Cryopreservation Method for Drosophila Melanogaster Embryos"
IMPACT: The group developed a practical cryopreservation method for the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) which is crucial to genetics research and critical to scientific breakthroughs benefiting human health. 

In August, Zhan will be heading to Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School to begin a postdoc appointment. Zhan's projects at UMN ME will serve as the new platform technology, being integrated into many other testbed systems pursued by ATP-Bio, an NSF Engineering Research Center led by Bischof.