Zhengji Zhao is a high performance computing (HPC) consultant at NERSC (2007 - ). Her work at NERSC includes supporting materials science and chemistry applications and users, participating system procurements, developing workload analysis tools, porting applications to many core and GPU systems. Most recently, she has worked on bringing the checkpoint/restart capability to NERSC production workloads. She is a co-PI for a Berkeley Lab Directed Research and Development project, and has served in the program committee for several HPC conference series.

She has (co)authored more than 30 publications, including the work of developing the reduced density matrix (RDM) method for electronic structure calculations, and the award winning development work of the linear scaling 3D fragment (LS3DF) method for large-scale electronic structure calculations (best poster award in SC07, and ACM Gordon Bell prize for Algorithm Innovation in SC08). She received her Ph.D. in computational physics from New York University.