Announcing the 2022 IZFS Christine Beattie Award Winner!

IZFS is excited to announce the 2022 Christine Beattie Award winner, Dr. Yunlu Zhu! The award recognizes junior investigators who demonstrate excellence in the field of zebrafish research and exhibit promise as a future leader in the zebrafish field.

Yunlu was awarded based on his IZFC presentation “Linking molecular abnormalities to behavioral deficits using a zebrafish model for tauopathies”. See his poster here.

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.

Learn more about the Christine Beattie Award