Yaoyao Fiona Zhao is a Chinese and Canadian mechanical engineer who works at McGill University as a professor of mechanical engineering and William Dawson Scholar. Topics in her research include engineering design, additive manufacturing, and design for additive manufacturing. [1]
Zhao received a bachelor's degree in engineering in 2003 from the Beijing Institute of Technology. She went to New Zealand for graduate study at the University of Auckland, where she received a master's degree in 2006 and completed her Ph.D. in 2010. [2] Her doctoral dissertation was An Integrated Process Planning System for Machining and Inspection, supervised by Xun Xu. [3]
Before taking a faculty position at McGill, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US and the École centrale de Nantes in France. [2]
Zhao was named as an ASME Fellow by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2025. [4]