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 now Professor of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

He has published over 700 academic papers in refereed international journals and conferences.

Since 2007, he has been listed as one of the top five world genetic programming researchers by the GP bibliography.

Since 2005, he has been awarded over 30 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.

He is currently the Associate Dean (Research and Innovation) for the Faculty of Engineering, the Chair of the Research Committee of the Faculty. He also heads the interdisciplinary Research in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Evolutionary Computation at the University. He is also a member of Scientific Advisor for Complexica (https://www.complexica.com/dr-mengjie-zhang).