Shuguang Zhang is at MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on designs of biological molecules, particularly proteins and peptides.

His work of designer self-assembling peptide scaffold won 2004 R&D100 award. He won a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and spent academic sabbatical in University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. He won 2006 Wilhelm Exner Medal of Austria. He was elected to Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2010. He was elected to American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2011 and elected to US National Academy of Inventors in 2013, and elected to the European Academy of Science and Arts in 2021. He won the 2020 Emil Thomas Kaiser Award from the Protein Society. He is a honorary member of the Erwin Schrodinger Society and gave for the 20th Erwin Schrödinger Colloquium at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2021. He published over 200 scientific papers that have been cited over 36,600 with a h-index 91. He is also a board member of Molecular Frontiers Foundation. Molecular Frontiers Foundation organizes annually Molecular Frontiers Symposia in Sweden and around the world. The Foundation encourages young people to ask big and good scientific questions about nature. The selected winners will be awarded for Molecular Frontiers Inquiry Prize.