Dollars for Profs
Dig Into University Researchers' Outside Income and Conflicts of Interest
Published Dec. 6, 2019
This database was last updated in December 2019 and should only be used as a historical snapshot. There may be new or amended records not reflected here.
Conflict of Interest
Institutions must file significant disclosures to the National Institutes of Health if they determine financial relationships could affect the design, conduct or reporting of the NIH-funded research. The NIH provided us with their entire financial conflict of interest database, with filings from 2012 through 2019.
Should you be removed from our database? Contact us at [email protected]. Read more below.
David Zhang
Rice University, Department: Biomedical Engineering
Should you be removed from our database? Contact us at [email protected]. Read more below.
Searna Technologies, Inc.
Equity Interest - Non-publicly traded entity ( e.g., stock, stock option, or other ownership interest)
The activities with Searna Technologies, Inc. (the "Company") involve the same technology utilized in the funded research. Rice University determined that this relationship may constitute a conflict of interest because it may be perceived that Dr. Zhang’s relationship with the Company could affect the design, conduct, or reporting of his research.
Enrichment of DNA/RNA Sequences based on Pre-equilibrium Hybridization Kinetics
There are roughly 1017, or one hundred million billion, nucleotides of DNA in every milliliter of human blood, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) is roughly a factor of 10 million short of being able to sequence all of that. Consequently, we need a way of enriching the sample for DNA of interest by removing the vast majority of the healthy human DNA that does not provide meaningful scientific or clinical information. This project proposes new, rationally-designed reagents to enrich for specific sequences and classes of sequences with better uniformity and specificity than prior methods, based on customizable binding speeds (kinetics).
Filed on March 15, 2016.
Tell us what you know about David Zhang's disclosure
We're still reporting about conflicts of interest. Is there something you'd like to tell us about this disclosure?
David Zhang filed other conflict of interest disclosures with the NIH:
| Name | Institution | Type | Company | Disclosed Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Zhang | Rice University | Conflict of Interest | NuProbe | $100,000 - $149,999 |
| David Zhang | Rice University | Conflict of Interest | NuProbe | Value cannot be readily determined |
| David Zhang | Rice University | Conflict of Interest | Searna Technologies, Inc. | Value cannot be readily determined |
| David Zhang | Rice University | Conflict of Interest | Torus Biosystems | Value cannot be readily determined |
| David Zhang | Rice University | Conflict of Interest | Nuprobe Global | Value cannot be readily determined |
Notes: When a more specific filing date is not available for an individual financial disclosure or conflict of interest form, we use the year the form was filed. If the year was not disclosed, we report the range of years covered by our public records requests. In a few cases, a start date was provided instead of a filing date. In those cases, we use the start date instead.
Fewer than 10% of records from the University of Florida and fewer than 1% of records from the University of Texas system were removed because they did not contain enough information.
ProPublica obtained additional financial disclosures and conflict of interest forms that we have not yet digitized and added to the database. You can download those disclosures in the ProPublica Data Store.