Dr Zhu is a Senior Lecturer from the School of Biomedical Engineering at UTS and the group leader of the Laboratory of In-Vitro NanoDiagnostics. She completed her PhD in the area of optical biosensors with Professor Justin Gooding (Editor-in-Chief of ACS Sensor) from 2011 to 2015 in Australia’s top biosensor and biodevice group at UNSW. Dr Zhu’s subsequent postdoc work (2015-2017) in the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College (ranked 55th among American engineering schools) extended her expertise in biosensors to the field of translational cancer research. Dr Zhu was supported by Cancer Institute NSW Early Career Fellowship (2017-2020) to further establish her work in using nanoplasmonic biosensor for cancer diagnosis. She joined UTS in 2020 as a Lecturer and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2023. Dr Zhu was a recipient of DECRA 2024.

Dr Zhu is rapidly gaining international recognition as an emerging leader in her field, recognised by her publications in prestigious journals. Out of her 29 publications, 81.8% are in the top 10% of journals and 91% are in the Q1 journals. Ying’s works have received 922 citations with an H-index of 18, including a 1% highly cited paper in Clinical Medicine. Ying has secured $1.89m in research funds. She was the lead CI in 90% of her external funds, including two prestigious fellowships: DECRA and Cancer Institute NSW Early Career Fellowship.  

Dr Zhu’s current research focuses on advancing diagnostic technologies by translating frontier nanoscale tools. She works in a multidisciplinary field across chemistry, physics, materials, nanotechnology and biomedicine. She has been dedicated to translational biomedical research via the development of new analytical technologies using a multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative, “bench-to-bedside” approach.