Lidong Zhou
Corporate Vice President, Chief Scientist of Microsoft Asia Pacific R&D Group, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia
About
Dr. Lidong Zhou is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, Chief Scientist of the Microsoft Asia Pacific R&D Group, and Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia (opens in new tab).
With a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, Dr. Zhou’s career at Microsoft began in 2002. His journey has spanned across Microsoft’s Research labs, including the Silicon Valley lab as a researcher, the Redmond lab as a principal researcher and Research Manager of the Systems Research Group, and the Asia lab where he currently serves as the Managing Director since 2021.
Dr. Zhou’s expertise lies in the field of computer systems research, particularly in developing scalable, reliable, and trustworthy distributed systems, with best papers at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), and the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC). He has played a pivotal role in the design and development of large-scale distributed systems, which are integral to various Microsoft products and services, from search engines and big data infrastructure to cloud systems and AI infrastructure.
Dr. Zhou is both an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He has served on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Storage (opens in new tab), and IEEE Transactions on Computers (opens in new tab). In 2023, he chaired the ACM Software System Award Committee (opens in new tab) and currently chairs the steering committee of SOSP. He was the general Co-Chair of SOSP 2017 and will serve as the PC Co-Chair of OSDI 2025.
Featured content
The brave new world of cloud-scale systems and networking with Dr. Lidong Zhou
Episode 82, June 26, 2019 - If you’re like me, you’re no longer amazed by how all your technologies can work for you. Rather, you’ve begun to take for granted that they simply should work for you. Instantly. All together. All the time. The fact that you’re not amazed is a testimony to the work that people like Dr. Lidong Zhou, Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, do every day. He oversees some of the cutting-edge systems and networking research that goes on behind the scenes to make sure you’re not amazed when your technologies work together seamlessly but rather, can continue to take it for granted that they will!