Yaoyao Fiona Zhao

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.

Education and career 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. Her doctoral dissertation was An Integrated Process Planning System for Machining and Inspection, supervised by Xun Xu.

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.

Recognition Zhao was named as an ASME Fellow by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2025.