Yao Zheng

Curriculum Vitae

Yao Zheng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and an IEEE Senior Member. His research broadly focuses on programmable wireless devices, systems, and environments, and hardware–microsystem co-design for next-generation wireless networks. His work targets a wide range of applications, including healthcare and biomedical sensing, human-centered monitoring, intelligent transportation systems, smart infrastructure, agriculture, and biosecurity, with an emphasis on field-deployable sensing platforms that tightly integrate communication, sensing, and environmental programmability. These platforms enable capabilities such as health monitoring and assisted living, connected and autonomous transportation, precision agriculture, invasive species detection, and biosecurity surveillance, as well as operation in security-critical cyber-physical systems. Dr. Zheng received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Applications from Virginia Tech and has held a Visiting Scientist appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research contributions have been disseminated through leading journals and conferences, including the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Journal of Microwaves, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, as well as top-tier venues such as IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE GLOBECOM, and ACM WiSec. Through sustained contributions to IEEE and ACM venues and interdisciplinary collaboration across RF hardware, microsystems, and signal processing, his research has been supported by federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense, state agencies in Hawai‘i focused on agriculture, biosecurity, and sustainability, and international collaborations advancing next-generation radio systems. At the core of his research is an emphasis on end-to-end system realization and validation, integrating RF hardware, microsystems, electromagnetic structures, signal processing, and machine learning. His group designs and evaluates complete sensing-and-communication pipelines using software-defined radios, millimeter-wave transceivers, adaptive electromagnetic components, and custom sensing front-ends. This work bridges full-wave and ray-based electromagnetic modeling with real-time prototyping and measurement, ensuring that algorithmic and architectural innovations are grounded in physical hardware behavior. Building on this hardware foundation, Dr. Zheng conducts system-level research on advanced wireless platforms operating at millimeter-wave and higher frequencies, where wide bandwidth, high spatial resolution, and sparse propagation open new opportunities beyond conventional data transmission. His research explores novel uses of wireless signals as a physical-world interface, examining how waveform design, beamforming, and spatial diversity can be jointly exploited to support communication, environmental perception, and human-centric sensing within unified system architectures. This work emphasizes cross-layer novelty, explicitly connecting electromagnetic and hardware constraints with signal processing and system-level design. To translate these advances into deployable and market-relevant technologies, Dr. Zheng actively collaborates with industry partners to bridge academic research and commercial wireless platforms. These efforts focus on scalable mmWave and higher-frequency hardware solutions, including antenna-in-package (AiP) architectures, beamforming front-ends, and tightly integrated RF–baseband modules, enabling sensing- and communication-capable systems suitable for real-world deployment. Through close interaction with industry engineers and system designers, his research informs practical design considerations—such as manufacturability, calibration, thermal and power constraints, and system integration—accelerating the transition from laboratory prototypes to market-ready wireless sensing and communication products.