Ms XIAOMENG ZHANG

Dr Xiaomeng Zhang is a research associate at the Centre for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, where her research focuses on genetic epidemiology and cancer risk prediction, with a particular emphasis on benign diseases, precursors, and cancer in the breast. 

Xiaomeng began her academic journey in public health, contributing to infectious disease research before shifting her focus to cancer epidemiology during her MSc training at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and PhD training at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research centred on colorectal cancer, encompassing evidence-based analysis, the development of polygenic risk scores, phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS), and the investigation of modifiable risk factors, such as vitamin D and physical activity, using Mendelian randomisation methods. 

At Cambridge, she has extended her work to benign diseases, precursors, and cancer in the breast, leading studies on inherited genetic variation, tumour genomics, mammographic density, and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). This includes contributions to major international collaborations such as the EU-funded B-CAST project and the NCI Confluence project.