Dr. Zou is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arkansas (UA) and currently holds the Twenty-First Century Chair of Materials, Manufacturing, and Integrated Systems. She is also a faculty member of the Institute for Nanoscale Science and Engineering and the interdisciplinary Microelectronics-photonics (microEP) Graduate Program at the UA. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999 with prior work experience at the Shanghai Aircraft Research Institute (1991-1994). Before joining the UA in August 2003, she was a Senior Advisory Development Engineer and then a Staff Engineer at Seagate Technology (1999-2003), where she contributed to the new technology development of the computer hard drive head-disk interface.