Professor Zhang has 26 years of experience in studying hydrology, remote sensing and water resources under climate change. Currently, he is the Distinguished Professor in Hydrology and Water Resources working at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Deputy Director of Key Laboratory of Water Cycle and Related Land Surface Processes. He is the Chief Megadrought Scientist of the National Key Research and Development Program of China. He worked in CSIRO as the Research Scientist, Senior Research Scientist and Principal Research Scientist in 2006-2019. He has won more than 30 million RMB of research funding since 2019. He leads a group of 25 hydrologists working on understanding and quantifying regional and global hydrological processes under climate change, water resource assessments, predicting floods and droughts, and integrated catchment management.

Professor Zhang is a global leader in incorporating remote sensing techniques into hydrological and ecohydrological modelling. He published 104 first/corresponding author papers in mainstream journals such as Science and Nature Water, Nature Communications and Water Resources Research, having 6 ESI top 1% highly cited papers. He has Google Scholar Citations > 14,000 and a Web of Science Researcher ID h-index of 53. His diagnostic evapotranspiration (ET) work has global impacts. His PML-ET model has been selected as a benchmark model to evaluate IPCC global climate model simulations, and the related modelled results have been used for the State of the Climate report. His coupled ET and gross primary production products have been used by more than 180 institutions, organizations and agencies globally.