Zhiling “Zach” Zheng was born and raised in Fuzhou, a subtropical coastal city in southeastern China with over 2,200 years of history and rich cultural heritage. His love for chemistry was first sparked in middle school, when a teacher demonstrated the crystallization of copper sulfate—a vivid moment that inspired his curiosity about the beauty of chemical structures. Seeking to further his study of science, he came to Cornell University, where his passion for inorganic crystals deepened while working with Professor Kyle Lancaster, specifically by combining glovebox synthesis with DFT calculations to study electronic structures.

He then pursued his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he joined Professor Omar Yaghi’s laboratory in the College of Chemistry. His graduate research was supported by the Kavli ENSI Graduate Fellowship. At Berkeley, he pioneered the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for water harvesting and explored the emerging intersection of large language models (LLMs) with chemical research.

To expand his expertise in automation and data-driven discovery, Zach conducted postdoctoral research from 2023 to 2024 in Professor Klavs Jensen’s group at MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, where he integrated machine learning with automated platforms to accelerate electrochemical reaction discovery. In 2025, he returned to UC Berkeley as a BIDMaP Fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), focusing on deep learning approaches for materials discovery.

Zach will join the Department of Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor in the summer of 2025. His research program leverages his multidisciplinary training to address fundamental challenges in data-driven reticular chemistry.

Outside the lab, Zach enjoys playing badminton, landscape photography, and exploring beautiful national parks.