Weiyi Zhang is currently the Sr. Director and head of external innovation China at Boehringer Ingelheim, and she is responsible for setting up collaborations in China for research functions at BI. Weiyi gained her bachelor degree in Biology at Xiamen University in 2001. She joined international Max-Planck research school in chemical biology in 2003 and studied function of olfactory G-protein coupled receptor in non-olfactory tissues. She obtained her Ph.D in cell biology from Ruhr-University Bochum in 2007. Since 2008, Weiyi started postdoc training in functional study of orphan GPCRs in central neural system at both National Institute of Biological Sciences and the University of Hong Kong.

Before joining Boehringer Ingelheim, Weiyi has led a cell biology group at BioDuro-PPD in Beijing since 2009, focusing on cell-based assays and integrated early drug discovery programs for various pharmaceutical companies. Then she has led the monoclonal antibody research group at Bio-Rad Laboratory in Shanghai from 2012 to 2013. From 2013 to 2016, Weiyi was the associate director at Innovation Center China of Global Drug Discovery at Bayer Healthcare.