Her research and numerous professional papers are focused on knowledge management approaches such as data/text mining, Lexical Link Analysis, system self-awareness, Collaborative Learning Agents, search and visualization for decision-making, and collaboration. Dr. Zhao was principal investigator (PI) for six contracts awarded by the DoD Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program. Dr. Zhao is a co-author of four U.S. patents in knowledge pattern search from networked agents and data fusion and visualization for multiple anomaly detection systems. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT and is the Co-Founder of Quantum Intelligence, Inc.