She is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Stony Brook University, Associate Dean for Diversity and Academic Affairs in the Stony Brook College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
[2] [3] Yang earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science and engineering at Tsinghua University in 1982 and 1984, respectively.
[4] She moved to Stony Brook in 1999, from a previous faculty position at the University of Vermont.
[1] Yang was named an IEEE Fellow in 2009 "for contributions to parallel and distributed computing systems".
[6] In 2022 she won the Outstanding Service Award of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed Processing.