Wangmei Zha is a Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) working in experimental high-energy nuclear physics. Since his Ph.D. period, he has been deeply involved in the RHIC-STAR Collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), focusing on coherent photon-induced processes and strong-field phenomena in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

In the past five years, his research has delivered two representative advances. First, using coherent ρ⁰ photoproduction, he contributed to a Fermi-scale “single-particle double-slit interference” measurement and developed phenomenological modeling for quantitative interpretation. Second, he contributed to the first observation of the Breit–Wheeler process in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, demonstrating fully linearly polarized photons and building models to describe the measured distributions, providing a sensitive probe of the photon Wigner distribution and QGP electromagnetic properties. He is now also involved in the LHC-CMS heavy-ion program, pursuing photoproduction studies in PbPb ultra-peripheral collisions (γA/γγ) and enabling systematic connections between RHIC and LHC measurements.

Since starting his research career, he has published 50+ papers as a principal author in major international collaborations and as a first or corresponding author (including 1 paper in Science Advances and 4 papers in Physical Review Letters), and has been invited to write review articles for journals such as Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics and Reports on Progress in Physics. He has also organized and driven multiple workshops and focused meetings, and holds key leadership roles across large collaborations: Co-lead of the Light Flavor Physics group in the STAR Collaboration (721 members, 5 physics groups); Co-lead of the Heavy Flavor Physics group and member of the Editorial Board in the NICA/MPD Collaboration at JINR Dubna, Russia (hosted at the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility, 467 members, 5 physics groups); and Co-lead of the Heavy Flavor and Jet Physics group in the emerging ECCE/ePIC Collaboration for the U.S. Electron–Ion Collider (EIC).