Bio

Jun “Jim” Zhang. Graduated from the Shanghai Medical University (now part of the Fudan University) in 1988; finished PhD degree in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S. in 1993. He was a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York; and an Investigator and, then, a Senior Investigator at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S.A. from 1997 to 2011. He was granted NIH tenure in 2005. He served as a member of Advisory Boards of the NIH Reproductive Medicine Research Network and Neonatal Research Network, the World Health Organization (WHO) Consultant on Reproductive Health; received NIH Merit Award twice. His research focused on reproductive and perinatal epidemiology and conducted several observational studies and clinical trials. For instance, he conducted a multicenter randomized clinical trial to examine the efficacy and safety of medical management with misoprostol vs surgical management for early pregnancy failure (NEJM 2005;353:761-9), and a big data analysis on medical abortion and the risk of subsequent adverse pregnancy outcomes (NEJM 2007;357:648-53). He formed the Consortium on Safe Labor with 19 hospitals across the U.S. and collected over 220,000 birth records, and established a new standard for normal labor (Obstet Gynecol 2010;116:1281-7).

In 2011, Dr. Zhang became K. C. Wong Chair Professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Director of the Ministry of Education – Shanghai Key Laboratory of Children’s Environmental Health at Xinhua Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. He led a team of maternal and child health experts and launched a multicenter longitudinal study of the Shanghai Birth Cohort in 2013 to carry out comprehensive research on the effects of genetic, environmental and behavioral factors on reproductive health, pregnancy outcomes and child health and diseases. SBC became a member of the WHO Environment and Child Health International Birth Cohort Group (ECHIBCG). In 2016, a sister birth cohort named “Early Life Plan” was initiated at the Xinhua Hospital and the affiliated hospitals. So far, the cohorts have generated over 50 publications in high impact journals in the field of maternal and child environmental health. At the meantime, Dr. Zhang has conducted a large cross-sectional investigation in obstetric practice named “China Labor and Delivery Survey”. 96 hospitals in 25 provinces in China participated in the Survey and over 70,000 perinatal records were collected. This project has yielded some in-depth findings of obstetric and perinatal epidemiology in China such as cesarean delivery, stillbirth, preterm birth and analgesia use for labor pain.

In 2020, Dr. Zhang was nominated as the Chair of the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Public Health, a joint creation between School of Public Health and the Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Children’s Environmental Health.

The Department has a broad mandate in research, teaching and services in maternal and child health. He served as the President of Birth Cohort Consortium of Asia (BiCCA) for two years, and is now a member of the Committee on Climate Change and Toxic Environmental Exposures at the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO).