Zijian Zheng is also Associate Director of the Research Institute for Intelligent Wearable Systems and Lead Investigator of the Research Institute for Smart Energy at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). His research interests include surface and polymer science, nanofabrication, flexible and wearable electronics, energy conversion, and storage. Zheng received his BEng in Chemical Engineering at Tsinghua University in 2003, his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Cambridge in 2007, and went on to do postdoctoral training at Northwestern University in 2008–2009. He joined PolyU as an assistant professor in 2009 and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2013 and then Professor in 2017.

Zheng has published more than 200 papers in journals such as Science Magazine, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Angewandte Chemie. He has also filed more than 40 patents and has been the recipient of more than 20 academic awards. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of EcoMat (impact factor: 14.6), a flagship open-access journal in green energy and the environment published by Wiley. He is Chang Jiang Chair Professor by the Ministry of Education of China, Senior Research Fellow of the University Grant Commission of Hong Kong, Fellow of the International Association of Advanced Materials, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Zheng is a Founding Member of the Young Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong, and a Founding Member and Chairman of the Young Member Section of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences.