Dr. YY Zhou – Pioneer
CEO Whova
YY Zhou is a serial entrepreneur and academic leader who has built and scaled global technology companies while advancing the field of computer science. As Co-Founder and CEO of Whova, an all-in-one event management platform, she has led the company to support more than 60,000 conferences and events across 105 countries, helping organizers streamline event operations and enabling professional networking experiences for millions of attendees worldwide.
YY has a proven track record of building technology companies. Before founding Whova, she co-founded Emphora and Pattern Insight. Technologies developed by her team continue to be used in thousands of data centers worldwide.
In addition to her entrepreneurial ventures, YY is the Qualcomm Endowed Chair Professor in Mobile Computing at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and a former tenured professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has trained more than 23 Ph.D. students, including six who later became tenured faculty members at leading universities. She has also held various leadership roles for many top-tier computing conferences and organizations.
YY earned her M.S. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. She is widely recognized for her expertise in computer reliability, data center management, and mobile computing. Her wide-ranging achievements have earned her designations as an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and a Sloan Research Fellow, as well as the recipient of the prestigious ACM Mark Weiser Award.
