His research interests include interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence, 3D vision, computer vision, and deep learning-assisted medical big data analysis. He has published more than 30 papers in top conferences and journals, such as top journals Cell Systems and Nature Communications, IEEE TNNLS, IEEE TMI, PLOS CB, etc. and top conferences CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, ECAI, MICCAI, RECOMB, ISBI, etc.

Meanwhile, Dr. Zhen Li is the contact map prediction champion in the Olympiad in protein structure prediction (CASP12) and serves as the baseline method for the DeepMind team's AlphaFold first version. The corresponding paper has won the PLOS CB Breakthrough and Innovation Award (one per year) and is a highly cited paper in Web of Science. As a mentor, Dr. Li Zhen led the students to win the SemanticKITTI championship in the large-scale point cloud analysis competition, the second place in the ICCV2021 large-scale urban street scene understanding competition, and the first place in the IEEE ICDM Global A.I. Weather Challenge (out of 1700 teams). Finally, Dr. Li Zhen also received scientific research funding from national, provincial, municipal and industrial circles.