Affiliation: The University of Sydney, School of Biomedical Engineering

Mr. Yunduo Zhao is an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded PhD candidate, and a graduate research assistant at the newly launched School of Biomedical Engineering. Working as a biomedical engineer for years, Yunduo has developed extraordinary expertise in computational biology simulation, high performance computing, and virtual reality technologies. His research unites the fields of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation. Correlating hemodynamics modelled by CFD on platelet clotting microfluidic devices with MD simulated platelet integrin behaviours, he is elucidating the molecular insights underlying platelet clot formation under pathological hemodynamic condition, and the mechanical force effect on platelet adhesion at nanoscale. A cutting-edge protein-derived peptide docking simulation is utilized by extracting the key amino acids on the receptor-ligand binding area, to guide the synthesis of potential inhibitors to reduce platelet adhesion and aggregation. Integrating virtual protein design, big data mining, and molecular biology prediction, his computational mechanobiology platform promises in silico design of new anti-thrombotic therapeutics. Beyond basic science research, he has showed prominent passion and talent in computational vision technology. As well as developing an immersive virtual reality web-streaming and artificial intelligent cruising algorithm, he also started up a company to implement High-Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in the field of disaster relief and infrastructure fault detection.