Affiliation: Texas A&M University, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics

Dr. Lanying Zeng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and the Center for Phage Technology, at Texas A&M University. Dr. Zeng obtained her PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics with a minor in Computational Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. She then switched to experimental biophysics/systems biology in the Physics department during her postdoc. In 2012, she started as an Assistant Professor in her current institution. She continues the interdisciplinary research using quantitative fluorescence microscopy at the single-cell, single-molecule level, combined with mathematical modeling.  Her lab focuses on examining (sub)cellular decision-making processes and cellular dynamics in host-bacteriophage systems. The over-arching goal of her research is to quantitatively understand the lysis-lysogeny cell-fate decision making of temperate phages such as lambda and P1, and the dynamics of ssRNA phages such as MS2 and AP205 infecting bacteria through retractile pili.