The Department of Genetics Seminar Series continued on Thursday, February 26, with the Dutcher Tenure Recognition Seminar, featuring an in-person presentation by Guoyan Zhao, PhD, Associate Professor with tenure in the Departments of Genetics and Neurology at WashU Medicine. Held in Moore Auditorium, the event brought together faculty, trainees, and staff to celebrate Dr. Zhao’s promotion and scientific accomplishments.
The Dutcher Tenure Recognition Seminar is a long-held tradition in the Department of Genetics, honoring faculty members upon their promotion to tenure. The seminar recognizes not only their research excellence, but also their contributions to mentorship, scholarship, and the academic community.
Dr. Zhao’s talk, titled “A Unified Framework for Elucidating Molecular Mechanisms of Disease and Evolution,” highlighted her lab’s integrative approach to understanding how gene regulatory mechanisms shape nervous system function and disease. She described a comprehensive framework that combines comparative genomics, computational modeling, and functional genomics to identify regulatory elements and molecular pathways involved in neurodegeneration and evolution.
The seminar was hosted by Dr. Susan Dutcher, who reflected on Dr. Zhao’s remarkable scientific journey. Zhao began her academic training with a bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Environmental Biology from Peking University. She earned her PhD under the mentorship of Jim Skeath, PhD, where she investigated transcription factors required for neuroectoderm determination in Drosophila.
She then pursued postdoctoral research with Gary Stormo, PhD, focusing on muscle-specific transcriptional modules in C. elegans. Expanding her expertise further, Dr. Zhao joined the Pathogen Discovery Facility, collaborating with Skip Virgin and David Wang to study viral genomics.
In 2018, Dr. Zhao brought her extensive computational toolkit to the Department of Neuroscience at WashU. In 2023, she was appointed to the Investigator Track with a dual appointment in Neurology and Genetics. In 2025, she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Genetics.
As Dr. Dutcher noted, Dr. Zhao’s career reflects a uniquely broad foundation across ecology, developmental biology, genomics, virology, and neuroscience. In her lecture, Dr. Zhao demonstrated how she has integrated this diverse expertise—returning in part to the foundational biology of her doctoral training—to address complex questions about gene regulation in the nervous system.
The seminar concluded with a hooding ceremony recognizing Dr. Zhao’s promotion to tenure, followed by a celebratory photo session with her family, mentors, colleagues, and lab members. The event marked both a milestone in Dr. Zhao’s academic career and a meaningful moment of community recognition within the department.