Li Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering (MAE) and a Professor by Courtesy in the Department of Surgery at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is also a director of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) – CUHK Joint Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems. Before he joined CUHK as an Assistant Professor in 2012, he worked in Prof. Bradley Nelson’s group as a postdoc and then as a senior scientist and lecturer in the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland.

Dr. Zhang’s main research interests include small-scale robotics, from individual and multiple robots to swarms, and their applications for translational biomedicine. He has authored or co-authored over 300 publications, including Science Robotics, Nature Machine Intelligence, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Matter, ACS Nano, AFM, TRO, IJRR, SoRo, Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, as the corresponding author. His research work on artificial bacterial flagella was indexed by the Guinness Book of World Records 2012 for the “Most Advanced Mini Robot for Medical Use.” And his research work on magnetic slime robot was selected as “Top 10 Innovation and Technology News in Hong Kong in 2022”. Dr. Zhang has won several awards from IEEE international conferences, including ICRA 2010, IROS 2012, CASE 2020, ICARM 2020, MARSS 2022, NANOMED 2010, 3M-NANO 2021 and Living Machines 2013. He won the Hong Kong Research Grants Committee (RGC) Early Career Award in 2013, CUHK Young Researcher Award 2017, United College Early Career Research Excellence Merit Award 2018, CUHK Research Excellence Award 2019-20, and RGC Research Fellow (RFS) Award 2021/22. He currently serves as Editor/Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member of ten international journals, such as IEEE TRO, IEEE/ASME T-MECH, IEEE T-ASE, IEEE T-MRB, Advanced Intelligent Systems (Wiley), Biomicrofluidics (AIP), Research (SPJ/AAAS) and Med-X (Springer). Dr. Zhang is a Distinguished Lecturer appointed by IEEE NTC in 2020 and 2021. Since 2012 (after he joined CUHK), he has been acted/acting as PC/PI for over 20 competitive grants from RGC (13 projects including Early Career Award, RFS Award, RIF, EU-RGC, GRF, JLFS, and PROCORE-HK JRS), ITC (8 projects including MRP, Tier-2, Tier-3, PSTS, and TSSSU), the Croucher Foundation (2 projects), NSFC and Shenzhen government. He is also Co-PI in 2 RGC CRF projects. Dr. Zhang is an Outstanding Fellow of the Faculty of Engineering at CUHK and elected as a Fellow of IEEE (FIEEE), Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (FAAIA).