Yongguang Zhang

About

Yongguang Zhang is currently a Partner Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.

He started his career with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. From 1994 to 2005, he was a research scientist at HRL Labs, and co-PI/technical leads in several DARPA-funded networking and wireless research projects. He joined Microsoft in 2006, first as a research manager at Microsoft Research Asia, where he developed ground-breaking technologies in Software Radio, Data Center Networking, Software-Defined Networks, and mobile systems. He led the Wireless and Networking group to become one of the best research groups in the world. From 2016 to 2020, he created and ran a Microsoft Research special project on the Cloudification of Telecom Network Infrastructure that contributed to Microsoft’s entering the operator networking business. From 2020 to 2024, he was with the Office of CTO at Azure for Operators, leading Open RAN R&D for Microsoft.

Yongguang has made significant technical contributions in network systems and implementations. He has published extensively at top conferences of his fields (SIGCOMM, MobiCom, NSDI, etc.). He is a recipient of USENIX Test of Time Award at NSDI’19 for his work on Software Radio. He was an Associate Editor for IEEE transactions on Mobile Computing, an Area Editor for MC2R, and has organized and chaired/co-chaired several international conferences, workshops, and an IETF working group. He was a General Co-Chair for ACM MobiCom’09. He is an IEEE Fellow.