Jiao Zhang is visiting ICSI's Networking Group. She received her bachelor's degree from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2008, and she is now a graduate student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. At Tsinghua University, she first conducted research into wireless sensor networks, especially on designing and evaluating energy-efficient routing and data aggregation protocols.

Later, she focused on traffic management in data centers. Data centers have many unique features, including multiple paths between servers, a large number of short messages, and special communication patterns in the data-intensive scalable computing systems, such as many-to-one and many-to-many communication patterns in Map Reduce, Dryad, Spark, and so on. These features cause some challenges, for example, TCP incast, large latency of the short messages, and TCP outcast. She has built an analytical model to analyze the causes of TCP incast and proposed some solutions to solve it. She is interested in designing a novel transmission protocol for data center networks to solve all the problems faced by TCP and other traffic management problems in data centers.

At ICSI, she works with Scott Shenker, the leader of the Networking Group. Currently she is involved in a project on caching management in information-centric networks (ICNs). In an ICN, the content and the address is decoupled, and users can retrieve content by name.