Dr. Zheng has a distinguished career spanning sixteen years at the World Bank, where he worked as a senior corporate planner, risk manager, and financial economist. He played a significant role in prioritizing the Bank operations in more than 100 developing and transitional economies and in allocating the Bank’s annual operating budget of US$1.3 billion to meet the dynamic needs of client countries and to maximize the associated development impact through about 270 lending operations committing more than US$20 billion per year. He led a team of world-class risk management professionals on formulating strategies and actions to hedge and diversify commodity and financial risks in developing countries and to manage sovereign, credit, liquidity, market, and operational risks.

Dr. Zheng also participated in and managed numerous adjustment projects in several transitional economies in Eastern Europe; pension and social security reform projects in China, Ukraine, Brazil, Estonia, Costa Rica, and Russia; water supply and sewerage treatment projects in Brazil and Peru; pollution control projects in Brazil; projects on trade rationalization, cottage industry investment, and reforms of regional banks in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal; projects on financial sector reform, rural development and water resource management in China; and metal industry reconstruction projects in Mongolia and China. Meanwhile, Dr. Zheng is also a leading authority on economic and policy work for development sustainability.

Before joining the World Bank, Dr. Zheng was the founder and Executive Vice President of the Washington Institute of Management and Technology. While back in China, Dr. Zheng served as CFO and Vice President for International Business at FoodChina Co, a joint venture of seven Fortune 500 conglomerates in food and agribusiness markets, as well as the Director of Marketing of Wuhan Friendship Trading Company, one of China’s largest private trading companies.

After finishing his MBA program at Wuhan University in 1985, Dr. Zheng was awarded for his excellent performance a Ford Foundation Scholarship which allowed him to earn his Ph.D. in economics from Georgetown University. He also finished Doctor of Science coursework in Operations Research and Statistics at the George Washington University. He has published books and journal articles on game theory, financial engineering for risk management, portfolio performance evaluation and optimization, marketing, and international finance, and he received invitations to lecture at Harvard University, the George Washington University, the World Bank Institute, the ILO Institute, Northeastern University of Finance and Economics, Zhejiang University, and Wuhan University.