Yaojun Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in Physics from the University of California, San Diego in 2015. She was an independent postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science 2015-2018 and the Princeton Center for the Physics of Biological Function 2018-2021.

Zhang is a theorist working in the interdisciplinary field of biological physics. Her group seeks to understanding the complex behaviors of biomolecules and their assemblies across scales, from single-molecule folding and DNA bending, to macromolecular transport through nuclear pore complexes and intracellular space, to biomolecular phase separation and self-organization. She works closely with experimental groups to identify outstanding conceptual questions posed by biology and then utilizes physical, mathematical, and computational tools to answer these questions, and more broadly to develop new theories and models that apply across systems and across the panoply of living creatures.