Zion Perry biography: 13 things about Birdsboro, Pennsylvania woman

Who is Zion Perry?

Zion Ruth Perry is an American woman from Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, United States. Here are 13 more things about her:

1. She enjoys bioengineering because it exists at the intersection of the fundamental sciences of math, physics, chemistry and biology. 
2. She was the valedictorian of her class at Daniel Boone High School in Birdsboro.
3. After graduating from Daniel Boone High School, she went to Kortemme Lab at the University of California San Francisco in San Francisco, California, USA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
4. She was engaged to Yale University student Kevin Jiang.
5. She was born in 1998.
6. On June 10, 2016, she graduated from Daniel Boone High School.
7. In August 2016, she entered MIT.
8. In 2018, she went to Wat Dam Rong Boon School in Lopburi, Thailand to teach engineering lessons to fifth graders. She was with Nu Nusen, Lisa Nam, Panchita Sarovath, Eric Fishman, Michelle Noh, Katherine Wang and Yotaro Sueoka.
9. In 2019, she was a Rosetta Commons intern while she was a rising senior at MIT. 
10. In 2020, she encountered MIT researcher Qinxuan Pan.
11. In 2021, Pan murdered Jiang, days after she and Jiang were engaged.
12. She co-authored “Ligand-specific changes in conformational flexibility mediate long-range allostery in the lac repressor”, “Arena: Rapid and Accurate Reconstruction of Full Atomic RNA Structures From Coarse-grained Models” and “Discovery of a Well-Folded Protein Interaction Hub Within the Human Long Non-Coding RNA NORAD”, which were published in 2023.
13. On February 29, 2024, Pan pleaded guilty in Superior Court in New Haven to the murder of Jiang, her late fiancé.

TIMELINE

2020

• On January 30, 2020, she met Jiang on a church retreat in Norwalk, Fairfield County, Connecticut.
• On March 4, 2020, she encountered Pan at the Lindy Hop Society Bread and Bones Birthday Jam celebration at the Morss Hall of MIT.
• In May 2020, she graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering. In the same month, she and Jiang started dating. When he visited her in her family’s house in Birdsboro, he played the piano while she played the flute.
• In August 2020, she moved to New Haven and entered Yale University as a graduate student studying biophysics.

2021

• In January 2021, she was welcomed in The Malvankar Lab of Yale University.
• On January 30, 2021, Jiang proposed to her by the waterfall at Wadsworth State Park in Middletown, Connecticut and she said yes.
• On February 6, 2021, she and Jiang went ice fishing, caught a pickerel and cooked dinner at her apartment in East Rock, New Haven. At around 8:30 p.m., he was fatally shot by Pan near the apartment.
• On December 1, 2021, bioRxiv published “Ligand-induced changes in dynamics mediate long-range allostery in the lac repressor”, which she co-authored with Anum Glasgow, Helen T. Hobbs, Susan Marqusee and Tanja Kortemme.