Dr. Zixu Mao
Dr. Zixu Mao received a Bachelor in Medicine from Southeast University School of Medicine, a Master in Medical Virology from Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences, China, and a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Virology from Duke University. He completed his postdoctoral training with Dr. Michael Greenberg in the Division of Neuroscience, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University School of Medicine in 1999. Dr. Mao joined the Department of Pharmacology at Emory University School of Medicine as an associate professor in 2005 and was promoted to full professor in 2011.
The research goals in Dr. Mao’s laboratory are to understand mechanisms of neural stress response and their roles in neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Dr. Mao is especially interested in delineating the critical pathways or events that transduce stress signals within as well as between key subcellular organelles. As a corresponding author, his research effort has covered the mechanisms involved in the processes of neuronal survival (Science, Neuron, JNS, PNAS), DNA damage response (Nature Cell Biol), mitochondrial function (JCI, JBC, Autophagy), lysosomal/autophagic regulation (Science, Autophagy, Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, JBC), stress and dysfunction of miRNA biogenesis (Molecular Cell), and ER-lysosome stress signaling (Nature Communications). His studies have advanced our understanding of the roles of transcription dependent survival (Science, JNS), proteostasis (Science, JBC), miRNA homeostasis (Molecular Cell) and neuroinflammation (JCB) in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
