Zhang is a native of Shaanxi, born in 1963.
Zhang earned a doctorate from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in 1989 and pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Birmingham before returning to DICP in 1990, where he was appointed to a full professorship in 1995.
Zhang headed DICP as director from 2007 to 2017.
[1] In 2013, Zhang was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
[2] In 2024, he received the Future Science Prize for the development of single-atom catalysis.