Qingzhong Kong
Case Western Reserve University
USA
Biography
Dr. Qingzhong Kong graduated with B.S. and M.S degrees in Biochemistry at Nanjing University, China, in 1987 and 1990, respectively. In 1996, he completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Virology at the University of Massachusetts. From 1996 to 2000, he was a Research Associate in Molecular Immunology at Yale University, after which he joined the Department of Pathology at Case Western Reserve University as an assistant professor. Dr. Kong is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Pathology at Case Western Reserve University, where he also holds secondary appointments at the Department of Neurology and the National Center for Regenerative Medicine.
Research Interest
His laboratory focuses on prion diseases, functions of cellular prion protein, and muscle stem cells, including four main research areas: (1) etiology of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD) in humans; (2) public health risks of animal prions (Chronic Wasting Disease of elk and deer, atypical Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy of cattle, and Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy) and animal modeling of various human prion diseases (especially CJD); (3) the roles of the normal cellular prion protein in the biology and pathology of skeletal muscles and brain; and (4) muscle stem cells. His lab has created dozens of transgenic mouse lines for the above research areas, some of which are inducible by doxycycline or conditional when used with Cre recombinase expressing mice.