Academic Staff

Prof. Zhang received the BSc and MSc degrees in computer engineering from Tsinghua University, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and the PhD in computer science from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1994. He is currently the Chair Professor in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also the Hong Kong Global STEM Scholar. Formerly, he was a professor of computer science and genetics at Washington University, St. Louis, USA, from 2007 to 2021.

Prof. Zhang’s research is multi-disciplinary and spans across two fields, Computational Biology and Artificial Intelligence. His main research interests include the areas of artificial intelligence particularly machine learning and datamining, heuristic search and combinatorial optimization, genomics and genetics. He has published more than 150 research papers in journals and peer-reviewed conferences in these areas. Prof. Zhang is currently Deputy Editor of PLoS Computational Biology, a leading journal in the field of computational biology and Associate Editor of AI Communication: The European Journal on Artificial Intelligence.