Joe Zhu is Professor of Operations Analytics in the Business School, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is an internationally recognized expert in methods of performance evaluation and benchmarking using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and his research interests are in the areas of operations and business analytics, productivity modeling, and performance evaluation and benchmarking. He has published and co-edited several books focusing on performance evaluation and benchmarking using DEA and developed the DEAFrontier software.

With more than more than 130 journal articles, books, and textbooks along with over 20,000 Google Scholar citations, he is recognized as one of the top authors in DEA with respect to research productivity, h-index, and g-index. His research has been supported by KPMG Foundation, National Institute of Health, and Department of Veterans Affairs.

He has extensive editorial experience, as an Area Editor of OMEGA, Editorial Board Member of European Journal of Operational Research, Series Associate Editor of Springer's International Series in Operations Research and Management Science, and others.

He has published extensively on top peer reviewed journals such as Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Operational Research Society, IIE Transactions, Sloan Management Review, OMEGA, Journal of Banking and Finance, Management Science, and others.

He is a Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) fellow, and a William Evans Visiting Fellow (University of Otago, New Zealand). He was awarded a Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professorship by the Ministry of Education in China and is being honored for his outstanding achievements in the field of operations management. About 50 such professorships are awarded each year, mostly in the areas of science and technology, and only a few recipients have expertise in the social science and management fields. Professor Zhu is the first WPI faculty member to receive the award, considered China's most prestigious scholarly honor.

The Industrial Engineer magazine spotlighted research, conducted by Professor Zhu and his collaborators, in which they developed an optimization methodology for measuring efficiency of multistage networks such as supply chains, where certain outputs from the process feed back into the system (e.g., empty bottle returns). Professor Zhu has been developing benchmarking tools for use in service and manufacturing processes. In the summer 2013 issue of Sloan Management Review, Professor Zhu and his collaborator point out that often the results of benchmarking will lead to a major rethinking of past assumptions. Such tools help companies test their assumptions of productivity. The Industrial Engineering (IE) Magazine from the Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers also featured Professor Zhu and his research.

He also serves as PhD dissertation committee member in Universities around world including China, Canada, the Netherlands, India, Israel, Australia and other countries.