Dr. Zang is a Reader and the Founding Director of the Research Unit for Water, Environment and Infrastructure Resilience (WEIR), in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, University of Bath. The WEIR Research Unit focuses on broad issues of water research related to the field of civil engineering. The challenges of climate change, and water and energy shortage are the key drivers for our research.

Dr Zang is leading one of the world leading groups in developing and using advanced CFD tools in modelling fluid-structure interactions, urban and coastal flooding, and violent wave impact on coastal and offshore structures. The major contributions include the development of nonlinear potential flow method,  Particle-In-Cell numerical method, nonlinear Shallow Water Equation and Boussinesq Equation solvers on dynamically adaptive cut-cell quadquree grids, and their applications, including OpenFOAM CFD tools, to various coastal and ocean engineering problems.

She has led/participated in a number of national and international collaborative research projects, which include extreme wave impact on offshore wind turbine foundations, breaking wave impact on coastal protection structures like seawalls and breakwaters, optimisation and survivability of marine renewable energy devices, and the development of advanced computational fluid dynamics tools for accurate simulation of complex free surace flows and wave-structure interactions etc. 

She has been an active member in promoting international research exchanges and networking. She has chaired a couple of major international conferences in her field; and was a past chair of PRIMaRE Prtnership for Research in Marine Renewable Energy. 

Development of marine renewable energy;
Violent wave impact on coastal and offshore structures;
Advanced computational fluid dynamics;
Urban and coastal flooding