Faith Feiyan Huang and Lee Zhang, AM ’01

After three years as a PhD student at Harvard Medical School, Lee Zhang, AM ’01, decided he wanted to take a leave of absence from the lab and join one of the earliest internet companies in China. However, he was very nervous to share his plan with the lab’s leader, Constance Cepko, PhD, the Bullard Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, for fear of being met with disapproval.

“But Connie told me to follow my heart and encouraged me to do something new,” says Zhang, who praised Cepko’s unwavering support of students, as well as her dedication to and passion for science.

Fast forward five years, circa 2003, and Zhang had built his own internet company, eLong, into one of China’s largest online travel service companies. Around that time, he met with three HMS professors who were on a graduate program recruitment trip in China. They suggested that Zhang consider starting a business in the health care sector, but he had no plans to leave eLong. Soon after, though, his first child was born, and he says he saw firsthand that public hospitals in China were underdeveloped. He noticed that doctors had only several minutes for each patient because so many people were waiting for care.

“With the idea to build a better care system in China, I eventually founded iKang as iKang.com in 2004,” Zhang says. “I tried to bring internet solutions to health care just as eLong.com did for travel service in China.” Today, iKang operates about 150 medical centers in 60 cities in mainland China and Hong Kong and provides medical services to about 8 million people annually.

“Without the education I received from HMS, and the suggestion and support of those three HMS professors—Tom Fox, PhD; Thomas Roberts, PhD ’76; and Yang Shi, PhD—iKang would not have existed,” Zhang says. (Fox is now retired, while Roberts remains on the HMS faculty, and Shi is at the Oxford Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.) To express thanks to the HMS community, Zhang began supporting fellows in the Leder Human Biology & Translational Medicine Program (LHB), which was launched by Cepko about 15 years ago. LHB aims to give PhD students the opportunity to learn more about human biology and disease, while also facilitating the clinical and cultural experiences that enable collaborations between physicians and scientists.

“The program was inspired by the founder of the HMS Department of Genetics, Phil Leder, AB ’56, MD ’60, whose own career was a wonderful example of rigorous research aimed at translation,” says Cepko, who co-directs the program along with Thomas Michel, AB ’77, MD, PhD, an HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Expanding on his previous support of LHB, Zhang, along with his wife, Faith Feiyan Huang, recently made a $1 million gift establishing the Huang & Zhang Fellowship in Biology and Translational Medicine. The couple’s preference is to support international students, particularly fellows from China

“We have so many deserving, excellent applicants from other countries, especially China, that it is always so hard to not be able to offer them admission,” says Cepko, who praised the couple’s generosity.

Zhang says he would not have been able to come to Harvard 25 years ago without the University’s “open heart and financial support,” and for that, he is forever thankful. Reflecting on his time as a student, he says, “Both Connie and Phil let me feel nothing is impossible. There is always a whole world out there worth exploring.”