Zhang named Chinese Outstanding Student

Yumiao Zhang received the Outstanding Chinese Student award from Qiyue Zhang, the Consul General of the People’s Republic of China, at a ceremony held in New York City on April 29, 2016.

by Jane Stoyle Welch

Published May 2, 2016

The award includes a $6,000 prize and a certificate of achievement issued by the China Scholarship Council. Yumiao Zhang is the second University at Buffalo student to receive this award since it was founded in 2003. He received the award from Qiyue Zhang, the Consul General of the People’s Republic of China, at a ceremony held in New York City on April 29, 2016.

Zhang is a student in the Lovell Lab, where his research interests include nanomedicine and bio-imaging. He was the first PhD student to join Lovell's group and will defend his thesis later this month.

Last year, Zhang received the first place prize for his poster presentation at the 41st Northeast Bioengineering Conference, held in Troy, NY. His poster, entitled "Frozen Naphthalocyanine micelles for Intestinal Imaging," presents a new non-invasive method to image intestine function. By engineering nanoparticles with extremely high color content, their motion could be traced non-invasively in the intestine using an imaging technique called photoacoustic tomography. Eventually, this could lead to better diagnosis of conditions like Crohn's disease, or be used for colonoscopy screening procedures. The work was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Born in Harbin, China, Zhang received a BS in chemistry from Nankai University in 2010 and a BE in chemical engineering from Tianjin University in 2010. After spending a year doing research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, he came to the University at Buffalo to earn his PhD.