X. F. Steven Zheng PhD

Dr X.F. Steven Zheng received PhD degree from Harvard University (with Joan Ruderman) in 1993 and postdoctoral training at Harvard (with Stuart Schreiber). He became a faculty member at Washington University before moving to Rutgers. His longstanding passion is to understand the biochemical mechanisms of nutrient signalling in cancer and metabolic diseases and to develop new therapies.

Dr Zheng has made fundamental contributions to understanding the mTOR pathway. Working with Dr Schreiber, he played a major role in demonstrating mTOR as the direct target of rapamycin and elucidating the mode of rapamycin action. He further showed that rapamycin is only a partial, allosteric mTOR inhibitor and that the mTOR kinase domain is essential for mTOR overall functions. These findings provided the key rationale for the development of mTOR kinase inhibitors as cancer therapeutics.