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 is elected as a Fellow of IEEE (FIEEE), The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (FASME), Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (FAAIA), The Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (FHKIE), a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), a member of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences (YASHK), and an Outstanding Fellow of the Faculty of Engineering at CUHK, and he was appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer twice by IEEE NTC in 2020 and 2021.

Dr. Zhang’s main research interests include small-scale robotics and their applications for translational biomedicine. He has authored or co-authored over 300 publications, including Science Robotics (3), Nature Machine Intelligence (3), Nature Materials, Nature Synthesis, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, Science Advances (12), Nature Communications (6), 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 works on magnetic slime robot and microrobotic swarm for endovascular application at CUHK was selected as “Top 10 Innovation and Technology News in Hong Kong” in 2022, 2023 and 2024, respectively. Dr. Zhang has received several medals from international inventions, such as The Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions including one Gold medal with congratulation of the Jury in 2023 and one Gold medal from the International Invention Fair in the Middle East (IIFME2024). He won several awards from IEEE international conferences, including NANOMED 2010, ICRA 2010, IROS 2012, Living Machines 2013, CASE 2020, ICARM 2020, 3M-NANO 2021, and MARSS 2022. 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 (or was) Editor/Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member of ten international journals, such as IEEE T-RO, IEEE/ASME T-MECH, IEEE T-ASE, IEEE T-MRB, IEEE RA-L, Advanced Intelligent Systems (Wiley), International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing (IOP), Biomicrofluidics (AIP), Research (SPJ-AAAS), Med-X (Springer), and Bio-design and Manufacturing (Springer). Since 2012 (after he joined CUHK), he has been acted/acting as PC/PI for over 30 competitive grants from Hong Kong RGC (18 projects including Early Career Award, RFS Award, STG, RIF, CRF, EU-RGC, NSFC-RGC, GRF, JLFS, and PROCORE-HK JRS), ITC (9 projects including MRP, Tier-2, Tier-3, PSTS, and TSSSU), the Croucher Foundation (3 projects), NSFC and Shenzhen government. He is also Co-PI in 2 RGC CRF projects and 1 National Key Research of China funded by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST).