Mengjie received his BE and ME respectively in 1989 and 1992 from China and his PhD in Computer Science from RMIT Univerity, Australia in 2000. Since 2000, He has been working as a lecturer then senior lecturer, Associate Professor/Reader, and has now been Professor of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington since 2011, New Zealand.

His research lies on Artitificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data, including evolutionary machine learning, genetic programming and evolutionary computation, automated deep learning and neural networks, transfer learning/multi-task learning and domain adaptation, computer vision and image analysis, scheduling/planning and combinatorial optimisation, statistical/AI modelling and neuro-symbolic systems, multi-modal learning, generative AI and large language models, feature selection/construction and explainanle/interpretable AI, and their applications  to primary industry, climate change, (bio)medical/health, and high-tech/high-value manufacturing,  He has published over 900 academic papers in refereed international journals and conferences, and has over 50,000 citations on Google Scholar. 

He Received the “EvoStar/SPECIES Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe” in 2023, the Australasian Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Research Contribution Award in 2024, and the ACM SIGEVO Outstanding Contribution Award in 2025.  Since 2007, he has been listed as a top five (currently No. 2) world genetic programming researchers by the GP bibliography.  He is also a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in Computer Science in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Since 2005, he has been awarded over 40 million dollars of research grants from NZ Government funding and industry including Marsden Fund (NSF), MBIE SSIF, MBIE Endeavour, NSC/SfTI, and BuidIT, and international reputed grants including ARC (Australia) and NSFC (China), and Dutch Research Council (NWO) & industry partners. 

He is a Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealand, a Fellow of Engineering New Zealand, a Fellow of IEEE, and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.

Since 1 June 2023, he has been the Director of the Te Whiri Kawe -- the Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University. He also heads the interdisciplinary Research Group of Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning. He had been the Associate Dean (Research and Innovation) for the Faculty of Engineering, the Chair of the Research Committee of the Faculty from 2014 to 2023. He is also a member of Scientific Advisor for Complexica (https://www.complexica.com/dr-mengjie-zhang).