Department welcomes Assistant Professor Zijun Wang

We would like to welcome Assistant Professor Zijun Wang to the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology. She officially joined us in August.

Dr. Wang earned a Bachelor of Pharmacy degree from Jiangsu University in 2009. She was a lecturer from 2008 to 2011 at Jiangsu University and then at Peking University. She earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Peking University in 2014. Wang was a post-doctoral fellow at State University of New York at Buffalo from 2014 to September 2019, when she was promoted to research assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at SUNY Buffalo.

Wang’s research focuses on how brain reward pathways are influenced by the environment, especially stress and drug exposure and how maladaptation can lead to disease states. As a pharmacologist, her long-term research goal is to develop novel pharmacotherapies for brain disorders with abnormal reward processing specifically drug addiction and autism, by focusing on the epigenetics and circuits mechanisms. She uses multidisciplinary approaches incorporating behaviors, pharmacology, molecular biology, confocal-imaging, electro physiology, virus-mediated gene transfer, bioinformatics, circuit mapping, chemogenetics, transgenic mice tools and in vivo calcium imaging. She is using these techniques to explore the pathophysiological basis underlying drug addiction and autism, and to discover novel therapeutic targets for these brain disorders.