Professor Zhang is Professor of Physics, Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Standford University. Prof. Zhang is the co-director of the IBM-Stanford Center for Spintronics.

He received his Masters degree from the Free University of Berlin, and his Ph.d. from the State University of new York at Stony Brook. He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1993.

Prof Zhang is internationally recognized for his outstanding research work. His research was ranked by Science Magazine to be among the top 10 breakthroughs among all sciences in 2007. He was awarded the Guggenheim, the Humboldt and the Gutenberg prizes. Most recently, he was awarded the Europhysics Prize of 2010, which is one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of physics.