Hongzhou graduated from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2004 with a B.S. in Chemistry. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry at New York University in 2009. For his doctoral thesis research with Prof. Ned Seeman, he developed several DNA nanomechanical devices for Molecular Biology and DNA Nanotechnology. As a post-doctoral fellow in the Breaker lab, he is currently focusing on the nucleic acids engineering and the non-coding RNA discovery/analysis.