Yin Zhi is the professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, director of Key Laboratory of Urban-Rural Eco- Planning and Green Building, the Ministry of Education, vice-president of the China Urban Planning Society, deputy head of the China Association of City Planning and deputy director of China Green Building Council. He has directed numerous urban planning and design projects since 1985.

Some of his designs include the master planning of cities such as Guilin and Nanning in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, Hulunbuir in Inner Mongolia autonomous region, as well as Tsinghua University's campus, the west district of the Zhongguanchun Science Park’s core area in Beijing, the overall tourism planning of Tibet and the Olympic Forest Park. 

In recent years, most of Yin's practices and research can be characterized by cross-subject and multi-discipline cooperation and Yin has developed a method to train a large research team in dealing with challenging design projects - the knowledge of which he uses for post-graduate teaching.