Yan Zhu is a professor at the School of Information Science and Technology(SIST) of Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU). She received her Computer Science PhD degree from Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany in 2004 and her BSc and MSc degree from the Southwest Jiaotong University, PRC, both in Computer Science. 
She was a research staff member at Department of Computer Science of Darmstadt University of Technology (Germany) from 1998 to 2004. Before that time she had worked as a research assistant at Department of Computer Science and Mathematics of Philipps University of Marburg (Germany) for one year. She has joined the faculty of SWJTU since 2005 and is leading the Software Engineering Group. 
Her research interests span many aspects of Web data and source analysis and management. She is an ACM and CCF member and serves as a TPC member of several international conferences and workshops including DEXA2013，CMS2013，CSAE2013 and so on. She has reviewed for several international journals, e.g. TLDKS and J.UCS. She has published a number of works, including two books published by Shaker Verlag (Germany, 2004) and SWJTU Press (China, 2011).