In 1982, Zhao obtained her Bachelor of Science from the Department of Mathematics at Nankai University.
She later emigrated to the United States and attended Cornell University, where she obtained her Ph.D from the Department of Statistics in 1993.
[2] Current projects include equity ownership network, and its relationship to firm performance and innovation activities; identify signals from noisy data using non-parametric Bayesian scheme; and model-free data analysis.
[4] Her work has won National Science Foundation support for over 20 years.
[5] Zhao was married to Lawrence D. Brown (1940–2018), a fellow statistician at the Wharton School.