He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[1] Zhai received the BS (1984), MS (1987, under Guoliang Zheng), and PhD (1990, under Jiafu Xu) in Computer Science from Nanjing University.
In 1993, he left for America to pursue a second PhD, this time at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with David A.
Zhai obtained from CMU a MS (1997) in computational linguistics and then started working with John Lafferty.
[6] He also holds joint appointments with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Department of Statistics, and School of Information Sciences at UIUC.