Dr. Zhang is Professor in the Department of Neurology and Distinguished Chair in Digital Innovation at McGovern Medical School, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). He co-directs the Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies and serve as UTHealth's Chief Data Scientist. Before joining UTHealth, Dr. Zhang served as the Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics, and Associate Director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) at the University of Kentucky. He spent 15 years as faculty of Case Western School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, and later as faculty of School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). At CWRU, Dr. Zhang served as Co-Director of the Informatics Core for the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative, Associate Director for Cancer Informatics at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, and created the Division of Biomedical Informatics in the Medical School. Dr. Zhang's research focus spans large-scale, multi-center data integration, biomedical ontology development, user interface design and information retrieval, and agile, interface-driven access-control-grounded software development. During the last decade, he led a research group that has developed production-strength, actively used informatics tools for data capturing, data management, cohort discovery, and clinical decision support.
He led the development and sharing of national data resources following the FAIR data principles, serving as the data science PI of the National Research Resource (NSRR; sleepdata.org - the NSRR includes over 35,924 annotated polysomnography datasets from 25 prospective cohort studies representing 43,266 individuals sized 8 TB stored on the resource, and 1 PB shared with researchers). The NSRR has been selected by NIH as one of the standard data sharing platforms for NHLBI. Dr. Zhang has been the PI for the Informatics and Data Analytics Core for the NINDS-funded Center for SUDEP Research, a 14-institute collaboration to prospectively recruit, collect and manage epilepsy patient data, integrating clinical information with their physiological signals, neuroimaging, genomic and blood chemistry data (from
3,000 epilepsy patients) to accelerate SUDEP research. He led the development and operation of bespoke EHR systems such as EpiTOME, epilepsy tracking and optimized management engine. Dr. Zhang's research has been funded by NINDS, NCI, NHLBI, NIMH and NSF, with the most recent ones as PI for NINDS R01 titled "Neurophysiological AI-Ready Data Resource" and data ecosystem for the NIH BRAIN initiative: "Engagement outreach for a FAIR BICAN Data Ecosystem."