Ya Zhang is currently a Professor in Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and chief AI scientist of State Key Laboratory of UHD video and audio production and presentation. Dr. Zhang has led several national and provincial research projects, including serving as the Principal Investigator for the Ministry of Science and Technology's 'New Generation Artificial Intelligence' Key Special Project.

Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning and healthcare, with a focus on advancing theoretical frameworks and methodologies that drive AI applications in healthcare.

She has published over 200 scholarly articles in top-tier journals and conferences, with her work cited more than 16,000 times.

Dr. Zhang holds a PhD degree in Information Sciences and Technology from Pennsylvania State University and a Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in China. Before joining Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dr. Zhang was a research manager at Yahoo! Labs, where she leaded a R&D team of researchers with strong background in data mining and machine learning to improve the web search quality of Yahoo international markets. Prior to joining Yahoo, Dr. Zhang was an assistant professor at University of Kansas with research focus on machine learning applications in bioinformatics and information retrieval.

Her achievements are recognized through various awards and honors, including being named a Leading Talent under the National High-Level Talent Special Support Program (2023), receiving the Shanghai Technological Invention Award (2022) and the EURASIP Best Paper Award (2019). She is also recognized for supervising students who received the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (2018).