Huimin Zhao

Professor Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair and Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research integrates synthetic biology, machine learning, and laboratory automation to engineer proteins, metabolic pathways, and genomes for biotechnological and biomedical applications. His work focuses on understanding and manipulating protein structure–function relationships, cellular metabolism, and mechanisms of gene expression and regulation, with the goal of developing scalable and reliable biological systems to address challenges in health, energy, and sustainability.