Hui Zheng is a demographer, ​social epidemiologist, and quantitative social scientist. He joined the University of Hong Kong as a Professor of Sociology in the fall of 2023. He started his career at The Ohio State University in 2011 and was promoted to the rank of Professor in 2022. He was a consulting editor at American Journal of Sociology, served in the editorial boards of Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Social Science Research, and was a council member of medical sociology section of American Sociological Association. He is currently a Deputy-Editor for Demography, the flagship journal of the Population Association of America.

His research focuses on understanding the causes, heterogeneity, inequality, and trends of population health and aging. It encompasses two interconnected areas: social and policy determinants of health, and population process of aging and mortality. He has investigated health consequences of various social structures, institutions, and policies; the trends of socioeconomic and demographic disparities in health; trend and heterogeneity in aging, mortality, and life span; the impact of life course dynamics of obesity on mortality; and the role of selection in health production and aging process. Methodologically, he is interested in developing and evaluating statistical and demographic methods to investigate the interplay of social-epidemiological changes, population dynamics and population heterogeneity on the trends and disparities in health, mortality, and life expectancy.

His scholarship is supported by grants from U.S. CDC (National Center for Health Statistics) and NIH (NIA, NICHD), and has appeared in high-visibility and high-quality outlets such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, American Journal of Epidemiology, International Journal of Epidemiology, The Journals of Gerontology: Social Science, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, and Journal of Marriage and Family. His work is covered by major media outlets including Time, New York Times, The Atlantic, USA Today, Newsweek, and The Times (UK).