Zhenglong Gu is an evolutionary biologist who received his Ph.D. in computational biology at University of Chicago and did his postdoctoral research on yeast evolution at Stanford Genome Technology Center. With training in both dry and wet labs, he started his own lab at Cornell University by investigating the evolution of aerobic fermentation in yeasts using multi-omics approaches and mathematical modeling. The similarity between yeast evolution and metabolic changes in human diseases, such as cancer, called his attention to mitochondrion, the metabolic, energetic and signaling hub of eukaryotic cells.

Since then, Gu has focused his research on mitochondrial genetics and mitochondrial gene evolution in humans, studying how mitochondrial DNA mutations and defects could impact disease risks and the way to edit and eliminate pathogenic mitochondrial DNA mutations in cells.