Xiao-Lei Zhang received the Ph.D. degree with honors from the Information and Communication Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2012. He was a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University from 2012 to 2014. He was a visiting scholar with the Perception and Neurodynamics Laboratory,The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA from 2013 to 2014. He was a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA from 2014 to 2016. Since 2016, he joint the Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China, where he is currently a full professor.

His research interests are the topics in speech processing, machine learning, statistical signal processing, and artificial intelligence. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals and conference proceedings including Neural Networks, IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TASLP, IEEE TCYB, IEEE TSMC, etc. He has authored a book 'robust speech processing bassed on deep learning', and co-authored a text book in statistics.

His 2018 paper, 'Multilayer Bootstrap Networks', received the 2018 Best Paper Award from the journal Neural Networks and the International Neural Network Society in 2020. He received the Excellent Paper Award Winner of Ubi-Media 2019 (with Mou Wang and Susanto Rahardja), the First-class Beijing Science and Technology Award in 2014, the Completion Award of Science and Technology Achievement awarded by Ministry of Education of China in 2013. He was an APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer in 2018-2019. He was selected into the Youth Program of National Distinguished Experts of China in 2017, and the Hundred Talents Plan of Shaanxi Province of China, in 2017.

He serves/served an action editor of Neural Networks, an associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing, and many other journals, and help organized many conferences and challenges. He is an elected member of the IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) (2021-2023).  He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of the IEEE SPS, ISCA, CCF, CAAI, etc.