J. Andrew Zhang is a professor at the School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Prof. Zhang is passionate about research innovation, and is a world renowned researcher in wireless communications and sensing. He has a wide research interest in signal processing for wireless communications and sensing, and autonomous vehicular networks.

Currently, Prof. Zhang is leading the UTS Radio Sensing and Pattern Analysis (RaSPA) laboratory, devoted to developing ubiquitous radio sensing and analytics technologies, by combining wireless signal processing and machine learning techniques. RaSPA focuses on two major research areas: (1) Building ubiquitous radio sensing infrastructure using joint communication and radio/radar sensing techniques, such as the perceptive mobile network that revolutionizes current communication only mobile network to one with integrated communication and sensing; (2) Harvesting information from radio signals by combining wireless signal processing, pattern analysis, and machine learning techniques. The aim is to extract information from the received radio signals for detecting, identifying, and tracking objects and events in surrounding environment.

Prof. Zhang is one of the pioneer researchers in integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). He initiated the concept of perceptive mobile network, by defining its system framework and demonstrating its feasibility in a set of papers back in 2017. Prof. Zhang co-organized a number of ISAC workshops at leading conferences and special issues in leading IEEE journals. He has delivered ISAC tutorials in WCNC 2021, ICC 2021, ICC 2022, and ISCIT 2023, and numerous keynotes and invited talks. He is serving as the publication co-chair of the IEEE Communication Society's Integrated Sensing and Communication Emerging Technology Initiative (ISAC-ETI) and the Editor-in-Chief for its official publication, the ISAC-Focus. Prof. Zhang has received more than six million dollars of research funds in this area. He is serving as the Technical Director of the UTS-TPG Network Sensing Lab, aiming to develop industrial solutions to transform TPG Telecom’s communications-oriented cellular network into an ISAC network. In particular, the lab is focusing on network solutions for flood and storm sensing employing ISAC.

Since joining in UTS in 2016, Prof Zhang has received ~$8M research funding, and has led the completion of numerous projects in wireless communications and sensing. He has published more than 330 papers in leading international journals and conference proceedings and hold 5 patents. He has won 8 best paper awards for his work, including the recent  IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award 2024 and the best paper award in ICC 2013 (the prestigious IEEE Communication Society flagship conference). He is a recipient of CSIRO top award, CSIRO Chairman’s Medal, as a seminal contributor and the Australian Engineering Innovation Award for exceptional research achievements in multi-gigabit wireless communications.

Prof. Zhang has more than 15 years of working experience in industrial research organizations and has led and participated in numerous projects developing innovative techniques and concept-proof prototypes and commercial devices. Before joining UTS in 2016, Prof. Zhang was a senior research scientist and team leader in Data61, CSIRO. He led the development of the world first 10Gbps E-band system, with a system demonstration successfully completed in Dec 2015. Other highlights of achievements include the successful completion of a 10Gbps baseband system using interleaved DAC techniques, and the development of advanced techniques for millimetre wave hybrid array, full duplex backhaul, massive MIMO, and cloud radio access networks. Prof. Zhang also worked as a researcher in NICTA, Australia, and as a System and Hardware Engineer in ZTE Corp., China.

Prof. Zhang received the B. S. degree from Xi’an JiaoTong University, China, the M. Sc. degree from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the Australian National University.