UC San Diego Professor Liangfang Zhang Named 2026 MacArthur Fellow for Cell-Mimicking Nanoparticle Work
San Diego is a city in San Diego County, California. Liangfang Zhang, a Chinese-American professor at the University of California, San Diego, has been named a 2026 MacArthur Fellow. The fellowship, awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and often called the 'genius grant,' provides $800,000 in unrestricted support over five years. The foundation cited him for 'creating novel nanotechnologies for targeted drug delivery, vaccines, and other biomedical applications.'
Zhang chairs the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and holds the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Chancellor's Endowed Chair. His approach borrows a cell's own surface: membranes from red blood cells, white blood cells and other cells are wrapped around nanoparticles so the particles can circulate like native cells, deliver drugs to diseased tissue, soak up bacterial toxins or intercept inflammatory molecules. His team's 2011 PNAS paper on red-blood-cell 'nanosponges' helped launch the field, which has since been taken up by hundreds of laboratories worldwide.
'This honor means a great deal to me,' Zhang said. 'It recognizes 16 years of work by my team to take cellular nanoparticle technology from an early discovery to a platform that has influenced the field and may ultimately benefit patients.' Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla said Zhang has turned cellular membranes into a platform technology to deliver medicines and combat infectious disease and inflammation.
Zhang studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT before joining UC San Diego in 2008. He co-founded San Diego biotech Cellics Therapeutics, which is working to translate the nanosponge technology toward clinical studies in bacterial infections, autoimmune diseases and inflammatory disorders.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: UC San Diego 标志性建筑 Geisel Library（张良方任职的大学）· Wikimedia Commons，CC BY 4.0
