Personal Profile

Work Experience

• Associate Professor: 2025 - present, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University.
• ​Assistant Professor: 2020 - 2024, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University.
• ​Postdoctoral Research Fellow: March 2018 - September 2020, Bito Lab, Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Japan.
  • ​Co-supervisor: Professor Haruhiko Bito.
• ​Postdoctoral Research Fellow: February 2017 - July 2017, Institute for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience (IINS), France.
  • ​Co-supervisors: Professor Etienne Herzog and Professor Nils Brose (Academician).

Educational Background

• ​Doctor of Philosophy: October 2012 - February 2017, University of Bordeaux, France, Neuroscience.
  • From October 2013 to December 2014, I conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen, Germany.
  • ​Supervisors: Professor Etienne Herzog and Professor Nils Brose (Academician).
• ​Bachelor's and Master's Degrees (Integrated Bachelor-Master Program in Clinical Medicine): September 2005 - July 2012, Zhengzhou University.

Research Interests

Research on synaptic plasticity and its role in cognitive disorders, as well as the development and application of in vivo imaging tools for observing neural activity.

Academic Achievements

Recent Representative Papers

Zhang XM, François U, Silm K, Angelo MF, Fernandez-Busch MV, Maged M, Martin C, Bernard V, Cordelières FP, Deshors M, Pons S, Maskos U, Bemelmans AP, Wojcik SM, El Mestikawy S, Humeau Y, Herzog E. A proline-rich motif on VGLUT1 reduces synaptic vesicle super-pool and spontaneous release frequency. Elife. 2019 Oct 30;8:e50401. doi: 10.7554/eLife.50401.

Zhang XM, Cordelieres FP, Herzog E. Investigate Synaptic Vesicles Mobility in Neuronal Culture Axons by FRAP Imaging. Bio Protoc. 2021 Mar 20;11(6):e3962. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3962.

Zhang XM & Yokoyama T & Sakamoto M. (2021). Imaging Voltage with Microbial Rhodopsins. Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences. 8. 738829. 10.3389/fmolb.2021.738829.

Kojima K, Kurihara R, Sakamoto M, Takanashi T, Kuramochi H, Zhang XM, Bito H, Tahara T, Sudo Y. Comparative Studies of the Fluorescence Properties of Microbial Rhodopsins: Spontaneous Emission Versus Photointermediate Fluorescence. J Phys Chem B. 2020 Aug 27;124(34):7361-7367. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.0c06560.