Professor, School of Informatics and Center for Computational Biology, School of Medicine. Trained as a theoretical physicist in a chemistry department, Dr. Zhou's research area moves to Chemical Engineering and Computational Biophysics during postdoctoral studies and to Bioinformatics when he became an independent researcher as an Assistant Professor in 2000 at State University of New York at Buffalo. His multidisciplinary training allows him to approach bioinformatic problems from the angle of physics. A recent example is the development of a knowledge-based energy function (called DFIRE) for proteins using the principle of physics rather than pure statistical information of protein structures. His group developed many freely available bioinformatic tools including SPARKS and SP3 for fold recognition and structure prediction, SPEM for multiple sequence alignment, SPINE for secondary and accessible surface area prediction, PINUP for binding-site prediction, MC2 for module identification from network of protein-protein interactions, and THUMBUP for topology prediction of transmembrane helical proteins. The long-term goal of the research in Dr. Zhou's group is to elucidate the relations between the sequence, structure, and function of proteins and to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying various diseases. This will be accomplished by designing simple (yet realistic) models and by developing statistical mechanics theories and bioinformatic tools.