David Zhang, MD, MS is a clinician researcher investigating common and rare genetic risk factors for understanding disease risk and resiliency in patients with pulmonary fibrosis. He is an assistant professor at Columbia University Medical Center and a clinic provider in the Columbia/NYP Interstitial Lung Disease Clinic.
Following his pulmonary and critical care fellowship at the University of Texas Southwestern, he moved to New York in 2019 to complete a Master of Science at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and pursue postdoctoral training in pulmonary genetics in the lab of Dr. Christine Garcia. Despite setbacks from the COVID pandemic in NYC, Dr. Zhang performed large-scale genomic analyses to make the seminal discovery of KIF15 as a novel risk gene for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). He then conducted innovative studies of emerging topics including understudied genetic risk in non-Europeans with IPF and identification of a pharmacogenetic interaction between immunosuppressants and short telomere length causing harm in ILD patients. Translating back to the clinic, Dr. Zhang led a pioneering study describing the clinical impact of genomic tools for routine ILD management.
Dr. Zhang now leads highly original studies describing the interaction between rare variants and polygenic risk factors in pulmonary fibrosis using clinical and biobank cohorts. His recent breakthrough findings describing cooperation and competition between polygenic risk and rare mutations provide groundwork to develop sophisticated genetics-informed risk tools in familial pulmonary fibrosis and to understand genetic resiliency to disease. His long-term goal is to develop gene therapies for pulmonary fibrosis and conduct genetics-enhanced screening studies to enable durable disease prevention. Dr. Zhang’s research has been recognized by the American Thoracic Society, the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, and the International Colloquium for Lung and Airway Fibrosis and supported by grants from the Francis Family Foundation and an NHLBI K08 Award.
