2022 Christine Beattie Award Winner: Yunlu Zhu

Yunlu Zhu
NYU School of Medicine
New York, New York, USA

Dr. Yunlu Zhu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroscience Institute, NYU School of Medicine. Yunlu studies the neural circuits underlying balance control in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. Specifically, his work focuses on progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a tau-protein disorder that causes frequent falls in patients starting from the early stage of the disease. Yunlu strives to understand how biochemical dysfunction leads to balance disorders in PSP. Yunlu has generated a novel zebrafish model for tauopathies, which allows him to investigate disease mechanisms across molecular, cellular, circuit, and behavior levels.

Yunlu earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia where he studied glia and neurodevelopment while accidentally discovering novel roles of neural crest cells in phagocytosing dead cells during neurodevelopment. His long-term interest is to understand how neurons and glia assemble into functional circuits and how molecular and cellular dysfunctions disrupt behavior in disease.

The Christine Beattie Award recognizes early career researchers who have demonstrated excellence in zebrafish research. It also recognizes the commitment that Dr. Christine Beattie had to training the next generation of zebrafish researchers. Read more about the Beattie Award and its past recipients here.