Yaoping Zhang biography

Yaoping Zhang (1962-2024) was a senior scientist with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at UW–Madison, where he ran the Experimental Fermentation Lab, one of the center's core facilities. 

Born in the Jiangsu province of China, Zhang earned a PhD in microbiology from the Beijing Agriculture University in 1989, when he boarded a plane for Wisconsin, where the late UW–Madison biochemist Robert Burris had offered him a job in his lab. 

Under Burris and later with bacteriology professor Gary Roberts, Zhang studied nitrogen fixation in photosynthetic bacterium and became an expert on setting up oxygen-free lab environments.

In 2011, Zhang took over GLBRC’s Experimental Fermentation Lab, embracing new challenges outside of his field, such as deconstructing plant material in order to figure out what was in it and reconstructing synthetic versions for experimental controls. Zhang ran the lab until his death in March 2024. 

Read more about Yaoping Zhang's life and work with GLBRC.