Dr. Zhen Zhang is an associate director of the Center for Biomarker Discovery and Translation and an associate professor of pathology and oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Currently, Dr. Zhang’s research is focused on the design of large-scale discovery studies for biomarkers and other molecular targets and their translation into clinical applications. Dr. Zhang is a principal investigator at the National Cancer Institute (NCI)-funded Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium Center at Johns Hopkins University and the contact principal investigator of the NCI’s Early Detection Research Network Biomarker Development Laboratory. He designed and conducted a large-scale multicenter discovery study and successfully applied these algorithms and tools to the generated proteomic data, discovering/validating a panel of biomarkers. He then derived a classification algorithm using these biomarkers as part of its input. The result, produced with his colleague Daniel Chan, became the first in vitro diagnostic multivariate index assay (IVDMIA) of proteomic biomarkers ever cleared by the FDA for clinical use.