In 2022 elected to a member of Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters and in 2023 elected to a member of Academia Europaea. She has authored or co-authored more than 300 papers in journals and conferences, and has served as a reviewer for many journals and conferences. Her papers have currently over 23300 citations in Google Scholar (h-index 72). She is tutorial chair for ICPR 2024, panel chair for FG 2023, and publicity chair for SCIA 2023. She was general chair of Arctic AI days 2022, International Conference on Image Processing and Media Computing 2022 (ICIPMC 2022) and ICBEA (2019, 2020), co-program chair of ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2021 (ICMI), co-chair for Late Breaking Results of ICMI 2019, co-publicity chair for FG 2018, has served as area chairs for several conferences and is/was associate editor for Pattern Recognition, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Image and Vision Computing, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of Electronic Imaging, and International Journal of Network Dynamics and Intelligence Journals. She has lectured tutorials at FG 2018, SCIA 2013, ICCV 2009 and ICPR 2006, and authored/edited three books and nine special issues in journals. Dr. Zhao was a Co-Chair of 23 International Workshops / special sessions in top venues, such as ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, ACCV and FG. Her students and researchers are frequent recipients of very prestigious and highly competitive positions and fellowships, such as professors/associate professors/assistant professors, Academy of Finland Research Fellow, Academy of Finland Postdoc positions, the Nokia Scholarship, Endeavour Research Fellowship, Tauno Tönning Research funding, Kauta Foundation grant and Jorma Ollila grant. She is IEEE Fellow, IAPR Fellow and AAIA Fellow. Her current research interests include image and video representation, facial expression and micro-expression recognition, human motion analysis, remote physiological signal measure and multi-modal learning. Her research has been reported by Finnish TV programs, newspapers, Technology Discovery TV, MIT Technology Review, etc.