Chao Zhang

Dr. Zhang was named chief executive officer in July 2021, having previously served as a chief scientific officer and senior vice president of research.

He joined Plexxikon in 2001, leading the company’s efforts in both computational chemistry and computational biology. Dr. Zhang assumed additional responsibilities in 2008 when the structural biology and informatics teams were merged to strengthen the company’s core expertise in structure-guided drug design. Dr. Zhang helped build the scaffold-based drug discovery platform at Plexxikon and has been a leader and key contributor to the company’s wealth of discovery efforts, including the discovery of Plexxikon’s FDA-approved drugs, Turalio and Zelboraf.

Prior to Plexxikon, Dr. Zhang was a scientist at Incyte Genomics where he developed an integrated genomics information system for mining disease-related genes and novel drug targets.

Dr. Zhang earned his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Boston University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.