Professor Zhang received the Ph.D. diploma in 2000, and did Postdoctoral research at Georgetown University and Harvard Medical School during 2002-2004. He was promoted to Instructor of Harvard Medical School in 2004. In 2006, he received the Hundred Talent Project award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and became the Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM). In 2011, he was awarded the Distinguished Young Investigator Award from Chinese Natural Science Foundation. Since 2020, he is the Professor and Dean at the School of Pharmacy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has authored or co-authored over 180 publications and 70 patents. Three small molecule drugs from his lab are now under phase I and II clinical trials, and a few candidate compounds are in early preclinical testings.