Prof. Zhang received his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2003, and then he worked in Electronic Engineering Department, Tsinghua University. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007. In 2011, he was qualified as a doctoral supervisor and began to serve as the vice director of the Institute of Information Optoelectronic Technology of Electronic Engineering Department. In 2014, he was promoted to the Tenured Associate Professor. In December, 2020, he was promoted to the Tenured Professor at Tsinghua University.

The research of Prof. Zhang focused on integrated photonic quantum devices and their applications on quantum communication and quantum information. Aim at the requirement of quantum communications and quantum networks, he developed practical quantum light sources with fiber optics and silicon photonics technologies. In recent years, he extended his research activities to manipulate and detect photonic quantum states with the use of silicon photonic quantum circuits. Accordingly, his work emphasized applications of these photonic quantum devices, and he proposed and demonstrated several novel schemes of quantum communication and quantum imaging based on the devices he developed.

Since he joined in Tsinghua University as a faculty member, he has undertaken or participated in a number of major scientific research projects of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the NSFC. He has published more than 100 journal papers, and he hold nine Chinese patents as the first inventor. In recent five years, he has offered over 10 invited talks in international conferences. In addition, he was the committee member of the Youth Forum of Integrated Photonic Quantum Information Technologies in China, and the TPC member of the session on quantum devices at the International Conference on Information Optics and Photonics. He is the senior member of Optical Society of America (OSA) and the member of the Chinese Optical Society (COS). At present, he teaches three graduate courses: Advanced Electrodynamics, Fundamentals of Photonic Crystal and Optical Microcavity, and Introduction of Photonic Quantum Information Technologies.