Xiaoli Zhang

Dr Zhang received her B.Sc. in Chemistry from Shandong University in China, and obtained both M.Sc. and PhD in Materials Chemistry from South Korea. As a research fellow, she worked on photovoltaic materials and devices at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, before commencing her Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship at the University of New South Wales focusing on solar fuel generation in Australia. With extensive training in simulation-directed catalyst design at the University College London in the UK, Dr Zhang took an academic position at Zhengzhou University in China, where she was promoted to professor. Collaborating with scientists from the University of Cambridge, she won the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Seal of Excellence Award from the European Commission Horizon 2020. In 2024, she returned to Australia to join the ARC Centre of Excellence for Green Electrochemical Transformation of Carbon Dioxide (GETCO2) at RMIT University. She was recently awarded the prestigious JSPS Invitational Fellowship with Tohoku University from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to establish research collaboration with scientists in Japan on profiling characteristic species in CO₂ transformation by operando spectroscopy.