Prof. ZHANG Pingwen was appointed President of Wuhan University and Vice Secretary of the Communist Party Committee of Wuhan University in December 2022.

Prior to this appointment, Prof. ZHANG served successively as Assistant President, Vice President, Standing Committee member of the Communist Party and Vice President of Peking University.

President ZHANG received his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Peking University. His research focuses on computational mathematics, modeling and simulation of soft matter, applied analysis and numerical analysis, and big data analysis and applications.

President ZHANG was elected as an Academician of the Division of Mathematics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2015, a member of The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries (TWAS) in 2016, a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2020, an academic leader of the National Natural Science Foundation of China's Innovative Research Group Project (2014) and a project leader of the Scientific Computing and Machine Learning Center for Basic Science (2022). He has been the director of the National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Analytics and Applied Technologies since 2018.

President ZHANG was awarded The HO LEUNG HO LEE Science and Technology Progress Award in 2021, the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award in 2014, the First Prize of the Natural Science Award for Universities of the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2007, the FENG Kang Prize in 1999, etc. He was invited to give conference presentations at the 7th International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2011, the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2014, and the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of the academic journal CSIAM Transactions on Applied Mathematics, the editorial board member of more than ten domestic and international journals such as Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, and published more than 100 academic papers.

Part-time positions held by President ZHANG include Chairman of the China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM).