Zhu was born in September 1964 in Yin County (鄞县, current Yinzhou District), Ningbo, Zhejiang Province in China, Zhu attended Yinzhou High School from 1978 to 1980 [4] and studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Zhejiang University from 1980 to 1984.
[5] In 1984, Zhu was among the 15 students nationwide selected by the Government of China and by a joint AMS-SIAM committee for PhD study in the U.S. (also known as the Shiing-Shen Chern Program).
Subsequently, he went to Yale University in 1985 and obtained his PhD in 1990, under the direction of Roger Howe.
Jointly with Sun Binyong, he proved multiplicity at most one for the branching (also called strong Gelfand pair property) of irreducible Casselman-Wallach representations of classical groups in the Archimedean case, and the conservation relation conjecture of Stephen S. Kudla and Stephen Rallis.
[citation needed] Zhu has been a Fellow of the Singapore National Academy of Science since 2014.