Professor Zhang is Director of Smart Grid, Birmingham Energy Institute at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is an IEEE PES Distinguished Lecturer on HVDC, FACTS and Renewable Energy Generation and carried out study on Global Electricity Grid. He is a Fellow of IEEE and IET.

He has been appointed to the Expert Advisory Group of UK Government’s Offshore Transmission Network Review since 2020.

He is the Senior Editor of IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy. He is the academic chair for the 2024 IET conference on Renewable Power Generation and Future Power Systems conference, Birmingham, Dec 2024.