[3] For her many career achievements, she received an honorary degree from the University of Chicago in 2011[2] and the Romer-Simpson Medal from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2016.
[4] Zhang was born into a wealthy and highly educated family in Nanjing, Jiangsu, on 17 April 1936, while her ancestral home is in Shengzhou, Zhejiang.
When she returned to China, she was dispatched to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
[6] On 5 October 2015, she received an honorary doctoral degree from the Richard Gilder Graduate School of the American Museum of Natural History.
She was nominated for "her pioneering work on fossil records leading to insights on how aquatic vertebrates adapted to life and land.