Director, Tissue Regeneration Program, Children's Research Institute
Hao Zhu, M.D., received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Duke University, and earned his M.D. at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received training in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. From 2008 to 2012, Dr. Zhu performed postdoctoral research at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he explored connections among RNA biology, cancer, and regeneration in mouse models.
In 2012, he joined the faculty of UT Southwestern and the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI). Dr. Zhu is the director of the CRI Tissue Regeneration Program and a co-leader of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center Development and Cancer Research Program. He is also an attending physician in the Multidisciplinary Liver Cancer Clinic at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
Dr. Zhu is the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists (2012), a CPRIT Scholar Award (2012), and a Stand Up To Cancer Innovative Research Grant (2016). He also holds the Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Distinguished Chair in Therapeutic Oncology Research.
The Zhu laboratory is interested in understanding the relationship between injury, regeneration, and cancer. Researchers are focused on identifying the genes and mechanisms that regulate regenerative capacity in the liver and understanding how these contribute to hepatocellular carcinoma development, which is the third leading cause of cancer death in the world.