Bang-fen ZHU was born in 1948 in Shanghai, China. He received his B.S. in Physics from Tsinghua University in 1970, and M. S. degree in Physics from Tsinghua in 1981. From 1981 to 2000, he did research work at the Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and was promoted Research Professor in 1989. He has been a Professor at the Center for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University since 2000, and the Head of the Department of Physics since 2003. He was elected as the Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003. Now he serves as Chairman of the Committee on Condensed Matter Theory and Statistical Physics, CPS£¬and Vice Editor-in-Chief of "Chinese Physical Letter".

He is author or co-author of about 60 research papers and five books, which have been cited by peers over 870 times. Among them, most remarkable is the theory on the optical phonon modes in semiconductor superlattices. Together with Prof. Kun Huang, they have first addressed and resolved the symmetry puzzle of phonon modes intrigued by a Raman experiment. The theory, which is widely referred to as the "Huang-Zhu model" in literature, has been supported by many subsequent experiments and numerical calculations. Being its importance, Zhu becomes the first Chinese scholar to give an invited talk in the International Conference on Physics of Semiconductors. The "Huang-Zhu model" is introduced by several textbooks and monographs in details, and is frequently applied to the low-dimensional systems.

Zhu has also made important contributions to understanding the effect of the heavy- and light- hole mixing on quantum well physics. With the insight into the structure of the 2D exciton spinor associated 4 components and the hole mixing effect, he has pointed out that only one exciton-component can contribute to the optical transitions, thus given a correct selection rules for the excitonic optics in quantum wells, and resolved the puzzle related to the h12a spectrum peak in quantum wells in the presence of an electric field. Combined the investigations about the optical phonon modes and exciton-spinor states, he and his collaborators have also developed a first systematic microscopic theory on Raman scattering in quantum wells in order to answer why the dipole forbidden Fr?hlich scattering become allowed. Their predictions have been verified by several experiments.

In addition to physics in low-dimensional semiconductor structures, his recent attention is paid to the system within a time scale shorter than or comparable with the typical dephasing time, which can be considered as the mesoscopic system in time regime. He and his student have proposed the idea of the dynamical Fano resonance, formulated a theory on quantum dynamical interference and its controllability in semiconductors under an extra-intensive THz-field, proposed the possibility of observing the exciton stabilization.

Zhu has obtained the National Natural Science Award (Second Class) of China in 1993; the CAS Natural Science Award (First Class) in 1989; the CAS Natural Science Award (Second Class) in 1990, 1995, respectively. As a Visiting Professor, he has been invited to research in several famous physics institutions, such as the UIUC, UCSD, etc.