Haixia Zhou

Haixia received her Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2019, where she studied SARS and MERS coronaviruses. She joined the lab in September 2019, initially as a joint postdoc with Dr. Johannes Walter to determine the structure of CRL2^Lrr1, the E3 ubiquitin ligase responsible for unloading CMG from replicated DNA. She then turned her attention to how cilia are built. Using single-particle cryo-EM, she determined the structure and polymerization mechanism of the IFT-A complex. She then applied cryo-FIB-ET to human airway cells to determine the in-cell structure of the human ciliary transition zone, revealing the linker complexes that hold it together and implicating two new genes in primary ciliary dyskinesia. Haixia was a BCMP-Merck Postdoctoral Fellow in 2021 and a BCMP Postdoctoral Fellow in 2024.