Director

Dr. Yuyao Zhang joined the School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University in September 2018 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, Ph.D. advisor, and Research Professor. She was promoted to Tenured Associate Professor in November 2024.

Dr. Zhang has broad research interests in medical image acquisition, processing, and analysis. Her current work focuses on developing efficient deep learning-based computed tomography techniques, as well as methods for magnetic resonance image denoising, super-resolution, and image reconstruction. These advanced algorithms are further applied to medical image analysis problems such as 3D reconstruction of the human brain from MRI, construction of multimodal 3D/4D infant and adult brain atlases, analysis of neurodegenerative brain diseases, and 3D parametric modeling of human tissues. Through extensive collaborations with other research institutions and hospitals, her lab integrates medical imaging technologies with clinical application scenarios, enabling the construction of fetal and infant brain structural developmental trajectories based on MRI, precise localization of small brain nuclei, and modeling of their degeneration patterns. Related research outcomes have been applied to frontier clinical problems, including early intervention, clinical diagnosis, and surgical treatment of neurodevelopmental diseases such as fetal ventriculomegaly and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as imaging-based analysis of the progression of COVID-19 pneumonia.

Over the past five years, Dr. Zhang has published more than 80 papers in top academic journals and conferences in the field, including MedIA, IEEE TMI, NeuroImage, IEEE JBHI, Human Brain Mapping, Brain, MRM, NMR in Biomedicine, JMRI, Journal of Neurosurgery, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, AAAI, MICCAI, ISMRM, ISBI, IJCAI, and SIGGRAPH. She is a member of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and serves as a regular reviewer for more than ten journals, including NeuroImage, IEEE TMI, IEEE TIP, IEEE TBME, Human Brain Mapping, and Neurocomputing. She has also served as a Senior Program Committee Member for AAAI 2022 and as a Guest Editor for the Journal of Frontier in Neuroscience. She was named a Shanghai Young Eastern Scholar and has led two General Program projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

• Member of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)
• Senior Program Committee Member for AAAI 2022
• Guest Editor for Journal of Frontier in Neuroscience