Zhang is the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications and an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego. Before joining UC San Diego, he was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2012 to 2017.

He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2012. He is the recipient of ACM MobiCom Best Paper Award (2011), NSF CAREER award (2014), and Google Research Award (2017). Professor Zhang was also awarded the 2023 SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award for his significant contributions to wireless networking and wireless sensing, especially millimeter-wave network systems and new sensing modalities, driven by novel computational models and programmable hardware platforms.