Lixia Zhang () is the Jonathan B. Postel Professor of Computer Science at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

.. Her expertise is in

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

s; she helped found the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

, designed the Resource Reservation Protocol, coined the term "

middlebox A middlebox is a computer networking device that transforms, inspects, filters, and manipulates traffic for purposes other than packet forwarding. Examples of middleboxes include firewalls, network address translators (NATs), load balancers, and ...

", and pioneered the development of

named data networking Named Data Networking (NDN) (related to content-centric networking (CCN), content-based networking, data-oriented networking or information-centric networking (ICN)) is a proposed Future Internet architecture inspired by years of empirical resear ...

Biography

Zhang grew up in northern China, where she worked as a tractor driver on a farm when the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal ...

closed the schools.. She earned a master's degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

in 1981 at

California State University, Los Angeles California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) is a public university in Los Angeles, California. It is part of the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system. Cal State LA offers 142 bachelor's degrees, 122 master's degrees, ...

, and completed her doctorate at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

in 1989, under the supervision of

David D. Clark David Dana "Dave" Clark (born April 7, 1944) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who has been involved with Internet developments since the mid-1970s. He currently works as a Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Scienc ...

. After working as a researcher at

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

, she moved to UCLA in 1996. She and her husband, Jim Ma, have two sons. They reside in

Sherman Oaks Sherman Oaks is a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles, California located in the San Fernando Valley, founded in 1927. The neighborhood includes a portion of the Santa Monica Mountains, which gives Sherman Oaks a lower population density than ...

Contributions

Zhang was one of the 21 participants in the initial meeting of the

, in 1986, the only woman and the only student at the meeting. In the IETF, her initial work concerned

routing Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone netw ...

, although her thesis research was instead on

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

.. She was also a member of the

Internet Architecture Board The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is "a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and an advisory body of the Internet Society (ISOC). Its responsibilities include architectural oversight of IETF activities, Internet Standards ...

, from 1994 to 1996 and again from 2005 to 2009. A protocol she designed for changing the settings in an experimental network setup became the basis for the Resource Reservation Protocol. Zhang's paper on the protocol, "RSVP: A New Resource ReSerVation Protocol" (with Steve Deering,

Deborah Estrin Deborah Estrin (born December 6, 1959) is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech. She is co-founder of the non-profit Open mHealth and gave a TEDMED talk on small data in 2013. Estrin is known for her work on sensor networks, participat ...

Scott Shenker Scott J. Shenker (born January 24, 1956 in Alexandria, Virginia) is an American computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the leader of the Extensible Internet Group at the Intern ...

, and Daniel Zappala, ''IEEE Network'' 1993) was selected in 2002 as one of ten landmark articles reprinted with commentary in the 50th-anniversary issue of ''IEEE Communications Magazine''. In 1999 Zhang coined the term "

" to refer to a computer networking device that performs functions other than that of a regular

Internet protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. IP h ...

router. Examples of middleboxes include firewalls and network address translators. Her term has been widely adopted by the industry. Beginning in 2010 she has been the leader of a multi-campus research project concerning

.Named Data Networking: First Phase Participants
Retrieved 2015-06-14.

Awards and honors

In 2006, Zhang became a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of both the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

and the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

. In 2009, she won the

IEEE Internet Award IEEE Internet Award is a Technical Field Award established by the IEEE in June 1999. The award is sponsored by Nokia Corporation. It may be presented annually to an individual or up to three recipients, for exceptional contributions to the adv ...

. In 2012, she was named to the Postel Professorship. In 2014, Zhang is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards. Her picture appeared on the four of diamonds in a pack of

playing card A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a fi ...

s featuring 54 notable women in technology. In 2020, she won the 2020 SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award.

References

External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Zhang, Lixia 1951 births Living people Chinese computer scientists American computer scientists American women computer scientists Chinese women computer scientists Heilongjiang University alumni California State University, Los Angeles alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty Women Internet pioneers Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellow Members of the IEEE Chinese women scientists Chinese emigrants to the United States Scientists at PARC (company) Internet pioneers 21st-century American women