Before joining the Quadram Institute, I was the founding Director of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Ottawa, where I also held a Distinguished Research Chair. I founded the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology and co-founded the SIMM–University of Ottawa Joint Research Center in Systems and Personalized Medicine in Shanghai. Earlier in my career, I served as Senior Vice President at MDS-Proteomics, managing international teams in Canada, Denmark, and the United States.

I hold a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Alberta, completed postdoctoral studies in Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington, and earned my B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Université de Montréal.

My research has centred on developing new technologies and bioinformatics tools to better understand complex biological systems, More recently, my team has focused on leveraging these tools to study and modulate the human gut microbiome and understand the interactions between xenobiotics and the gut microbiome. I also co-founded start-up companies.

Key publications

Li L, Wang T, Ning Z, Zhang X, Butcher J, Serrana JM, Simopoulos CMA, Mayne J, Stintzi A, Mack DR, Liu YY, Figeys D., Revealing proteome-level functional redundancy in the human gut microbiome using ultra-deep metaproteomics., Nature Communications, 2023 Jun 10;14(1):3428. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-39149-2.

Zhang X, Ning Z, Mayne J, Yang Y, Deeke SA, Walker K, Farnsworth CL, Stokes MP, Couture JF, Mack D, Stintzi A, Figeys D., Widespread protein lysine acetylation in gut microbiome and its alterations in patients with Crohn’s disease., Nature Communications, 2020 Aug 17;11(1):4120. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17916-9.

Li L, Abou-Samra E, Ning Z, Zhang X, Mayne J, Wang J, Cheng K, Walker K, Stintzi A, Figeys D., An in vitro model maintaining taxon-specific functional activities of the gut microbiome., Nature Communications, 2019 Sep 12;10(1):4146. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-12087-8.

Cheng K, Ning Z, Zhang X, Li L, Liao B, Mayne J, Stintzi A, Figeys D., MetaLab: an automated pipeline for metaproteomic data analysis., Microbiome, 2017 Dec 2;5(1):157. doi: 10.1186/s40168-017-0375-2.

Starr AE, Deeke SA, Ning Z, Chiang CK, Zhang X, Mottawea W, Singleton R, Benchimol EI, Wen M, Mack DR, Stintzi A, Figeys D., Proteomic analysis of ascending colon biopsies from a paediatric inflammatory bowel disease inception cohort identifies protein biomarkers that differentiate Crohn’s disease from UC. Gut, 2017 Sep;66(9):1573–1583. doi: 10.1136/gutjnl-2015-310705.