Prof Yao received the B.S. degree in engineering mechanics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2000, and the MS and the PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford in 2001 and 2005, where her research investigated electrokinetic transport phenomena in porous media for microelectronics cooling. Before joining the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she was engaged in developing ultrafast microfluidic mixers for studies of protein folding kinetics.