Dr. Zheng is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of Statistics and Data Sciences, Nankai University.

He has led the development of several algorithms for all-atom molecular interaction structure prediction, including C-I-TASSER, C-QUARK, D-I-TASSER, DMFold, and EnsembleFold, which predict the structures of protein monomers, protein-protein complexes, nucleic acid-nucleic acid complexes, and protein-nucleic acid complexes, and multi-conformations. Over the years, these algorithms have won multiple championships at the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP), outperforming over 100 academic and industrial research groups, including AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold3. Due to these outstanding achievements, he has been frequently invited to deliver presentations at international conferences, including the post-CASP meetings.

He has published over 60 papers in high-impact journals, including Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Nature Protocols, Science Advances, Nature Computational Science, Nucleic Acids Research, and PNAS, with over 4,200 citations. Notably, his three invited papers in Proteins on CASP13-15 were each recognized as a highly cited paper. Furthermore, he serves as a reviewer for several top-tier journals, including Nature Communications, Nature Machine Intelligence, and Nature Computational Science.

His work has been featured in The New York Times, Nature News, Tencent News, Sina News, and Sohu, accumulating nearly one million views. Specifically, D-I-TASSER and DMFold have been widely covered by social media platforms, garnering over 100,000 views and 13,000 shares. The algorithms developed under his leadership have served over 100,000 users across more than 100 countries, supporting numerous high-impact publications.