Pei Cao

Pei Cao is a Chinese and American computer scientist, and a vice president of engineering at YouTube. She is known for her development of internet infrastructure including web caching, search engines, and data replication.

Education and career Cao studied computer science at Tsinghua University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1990. She continued her studies at Princeton University, where she received a master's degree in 1992 and completed her Ph.D. in 1996, with a dissertation advised by Kai Li.

She worked as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1996 until 1999. In 1999, she began working in industry, initially at Tasmania Network Systems and later that year, after Tasmania Network Systems was acquired by Cisco, for Cisco. She moved to Google in 2004.

Recognition Cao was a 1998 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, given "for outstanding innovations in cache methods to improve WWW servers and global Internet efficiency, and for new tools for realistic Internet simulators for student use".

She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025, "for contributions to web caching, search engine efficiency, and information quality". She was also elected as an ACM Fellow, in the 2025 class of fellows, with the same citation.