Yang received a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991.
[2][3] Yang's doctoral research at Stanford University was supported by a NSF Graduate Fellowship.
She also worked as the director of design at Reactivity Inc, a privately-held XML gateway provider based in Redwood City, California.
[6] Later, she moved to the University of Southern California to serve as assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering.
[9] She won the Fred Merryfield Design Award of the American Society for Engineering Education in 2014.