Kang Zhang

Kang Zhang is a Chinese-American ophthalmologist specializing in ophthalmic genetics and aging processes in the eye. He is currently a professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Macau University of Science and Technology. He was previously a professor of ophthalmology and the founding director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a notice related to his research oversight, and he later left UC San Diego in 2019. He subsequently moved to China and continues his research, which includes work on lanosterol. ), gene editing, and artificial intelligence.

Education Born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, Zhang obtained his B.S. in Biochemistry from Sichuan University in Chengdu, China in 1984. In 1991, Zhang graduated with a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University. Subsequently, Zhang obtained his M.D. from a Harvard University Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint M.D. Program with magna cum laude honors in 1995.

In 2013, Zhang, along with Trey Ideker, identified that the molecular aging clock could be measured by blood and tissues, and made use of epigenetic markers.

In 2014, Zhang, along with Yizhi Liu and Xiangdong Fu, investigated mechanisms and developed a new method of limbal stem cell repair and regeneration.

In 2015, Zhang discovered that lanosterol can be used in eyedrop form to help prevent cataracts.

In 2017, the FDA issued a warning letter to Zhang citing violations in his oversight of human research studies and restricted him from serving as a principal investigator on such studies. Around the same time, media reports noted his undisclosed ties to a Chinese ophthalmology company. After leaving UCSD, he joined the Faculty of Medicine at Macau University of Science and Technology.

In 2019, Zhang was recruited to Macau University of Science and Technology to establish Macau's first medical school, where he became Vice-Dean for Research and Chair Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, as well as Director of the Macau Institute for AI in Medicine.

In 2021, Zhang and colleagues published a study in Nature Biomedical Engineering demonstrating that deep‑learning models could detect chronic kidney disease and type 2 diabetes from retinal fundus images, with potential applications in resource‑limited settings. In 2023, he was profiled in Cell Reports Medicine, where he described his work on multi‑modal artificial intelligence and was listed as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in Cross‑Field for 2019–2022. He was appointed Vice President of Macau University of Science and Technology in 2024. In 2026, he co‑authored a paper in npj Digital Medicine describing an AI model for personalized prediction of myopia progression in children.

Zhang and colleagues proposed and implemented MetaGP, a generative medical foundation model that integrates large-scale electronic health records with multimodal medical imaging, in 2025. Zhang, together with Jia Qu, also developed MINIM, a general-purpose large-scale generative synthetic medical image model, in 2025.

In 2026, Zhang, together with Shanshan Wang, developed AFLoc, a pathology vision–language model capable of lesion localization.

Awards Some of Kang Zhang's selected awards are listed below. The Ophthalmologist World 100 Power List (2016, 2018) Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2016) Fellow, Association of American Physicians (2011) Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011) America's Top Ophthalmologists, Consumer's Research Council of America (2011) NIH Director's Transformative R01 Program (2010) Senior Investigator Award, Research to Prevent Blindness (2010) Outstanding Achievement Award, Chinese Ophthalmological Society (2009) Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research (2008) Lew R. Wasserman Merit Award, Research to Prevent Blindness (2006) Macular Society membership (2006) American Society of Clinical Investigation membership (2006) Macular Vision Research Award (2002) Ruth Steinbach Fund for Macular Degeneration (2001) Charles Schepens Award for Excellence in Retina Research (2001) Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions Clinician Scientist Award (1999)

Professional affiliations Kang Zhang's professional affiliations are listed below.