Yang Zhang - Biography#

Dr. Zhang is a Professor and Distinguished Fellow at Northeastern University, U.S., with over 30 years of experience in atmospheric and environmental research across academia, governmental laboratories, and industry. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Iowa, U.S. and a B.S. degree in Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University, China.

Her research is highly interdisciplinary and advances the scientific understanding by developing and utilizing numerical models and analysis tools to address science and policy questions pertaining to controlling air pollution, mitigating adverse climate change, improving human health, and minimizing environmental damages in the entire Earth system. She led or contributed to the development and evaluation of major 3-D global to local scale atmospheric/Earth system models. She led many large interdisciplinary and cross-institutional research projects on air pollution modeling and assessment, atmospheric chemistry and transport, chemistry and dynamics of atmospheric aerosols, sensitivity, uncertainty, and process analysis, and interactions among energy/fuel use, climate change, meteorology, air quality, water quality, land, ocean, forest, and ecosystems.

She authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications in high-impact journals such as Nature Climate Change, Nature Food, Environmental International, PNAS, Science of The Total Environment, Environmental Research Letters, Geoscientific Model Development, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. She was a recipient of the U.S. NSF Career Award in Atmospheric Chemistry and several international fellowship and scholarship awards. She has strong international collaboration with top scientists worldwide. She is a member of the External Advisory Committee of the Community Modeling and Analysis System Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a member of the WMO's Global Air quality Forecasting and Information System (GAFIS) Steering Committee and also Team Co-Lead for Capacity Building subgroup of GAFIS. She has served as a technical committee member or chair/co-chair for a number of international conferences and panels. She has advised 18 postdocs, 13 PhD students, 15 MS students, and 14 undergraduates, and hosted 30 international scholars.