She joined the Mechanical Engineering Department in 2015 Spring, and prior to that, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center at Princeton (2014), co-sponsored by Sandia National Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph. D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University (2014), and she received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Thermal Engineering from Tsinghua University (2006 and 2008). Dr. Zhao is actively working on detailed radiation modeling, turbulent combustion modelling, as well as direct numerical simulations. She is a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, the ACS PRF DNI award, and NSF CRII Award. Her group is actively collaborating with industrial partners such as FM Global and United Technologies on multiphase multiphysical combustion simulations.