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 of Microsoft, Chief Scientist of Microsoft Asia Pacific R&D Group, and Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia (opens in new tab), responsible for the lab’s overall research and development activities, as well as collaborations with academic and industrial partners in the Asia Pacific region.
Dr. Zhou joined Microsoft in 2002 and has worked at Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley lab as a researcher, at the Redmond lab as a principal researcher and Research Manager of the Systems Research Group, and at the Asia lab as Assistant Managing Director. In 2021, he was appointed as the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia.
Besides his management role, Dr. Zhou is a renowned computer scientist specializing in computer systems research. Throughout his career, he has been continuously advancing the state of the art in scalable, reliable, and trustworthy distributed systems. As a key technical lead for Microsoft in the design and development of large-scale distributed systems, Dr. Zhou has initiated and successfully led a series of important distributed system projects that support a wide range of 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 served on the editorial board 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). He chaired the ACM Software System Award Committee (opens in new tab) in 2023 and currently chairs the steering committee of ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP).
Dr. Zhou received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Fudan University.
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!