Pharmaceutical Sciences department welcomes three research faculty

SPOKANE – Three new research-active faculty recently joined the College of Pharmacy – two from the Penn State University College of Medicine and one from the University of Illinois School of Medicine at Chicago.

Jiyue Zhu and Shuwen Wang, who are husband and wife, worked for the past 14 years at Penn State University where he was a professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and she was an associate professor in the Departments of Cellular & Molecular Physiology and Microbiology & Immunology.

Zhu has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire and a B.S. degree in Biochemistry from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. His research is currently funded by National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a National Institutes of Health agency.  Zhu’s research focus is on the studies of the telomerase gene that plays a crucial role in the formation of most human cancers as well as aging. Zhu is now a full professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at WSU.

Shuwen Wang also obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Dartmouth Medical School and a B.S. in Electrophysiology and Biophysics from Beijing University in Beijing, China. While at Penn State, she closely collaborated with Zhu, focusing on telomerase gene regulation in the context of stem cell research. She has joined the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences as a clinical associate professor, assuming responsibilities of teaching at College of Pharmacy and directing the new Functional Genomics Core Facility on campus.

Zhenjia Wang spent the past six years at the University of Illinois before joining WSU as an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Changchun, China. His current research is funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which is an agency of the National Institutes of Health, and is focused on designing and creating nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems to prevent and treat cardiovascular inflammatory diseases. Nanoparticles are valued for their potential to differentiate cells and tissues, release drugs in a controlled manner, and efficiently deliver a combination of different drugs.