Zhang earned his B.S. degree in computational mathematics from Shandong University, China, in 1998; his M.S. degree in applied mathematics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2001; and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Florida in 2006. From September 2006 to July 2008, he was an industrial postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications associated with the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Since August 2008, Zhang has been an assistant professor in LSU’s Department of Mathematics and CCT. His research mainly focuses on nonlinear optimization theory, algorithms and their applications to sparse matrix computing, graph partitioning, inverse problems in medical imaging and petrophysics and derivative free optimization.