Yixin Zhang (Member, IEEE) received the B.Eng. degree in electronic and information engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommu nications (BUPT), Beijing, China, in 2017, and the Ph.D. degree in electronic and electrical engineering from The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, U.K., in 2022. She is currently a Lecturer with the School of Information and Communication Engineering, BUPT. Her research interests include the smart radio environment, intelligent reflective surface, electromagnetic wave propagation, channel characterization, electromagnetic information theory, and MIMO antenna configuration.

She has already made several important contributions in the modelling and design of smart built environments by proposing the schemes used for evaluating the impact of electromagnetic and geometric properties of building materials on indoor MIMO communications and by analyzing the performance of indoor communications in different indoor scenarios, evidenced by her first-authored 5 journal papers published by the IEEE Transactions on Antenna and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and IEEE Communications Letters, respectively. Yixin has been engaging in several significant scientific research projects, e.g., EU H 2020 MSCA-ITN WaveComBE (2800 kilo Euros), EU MSCF AceLSAA project (195 kilo Euros). She is the principal investigator of China Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities entitled “Evaluation and Optimization of Wireless-Friendly Building Materials’’.

Yixin has been actively engaged in the professional community and therefore gained very rich research experience in collaborating with international partners from both academia and industry. In 2018, she was awarded the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship as part of the EU-H2020-ITN funded project ‘Millimeter Wave Communications in the Built Environments (WaveComBE), and was selected as a Marie Curie Ambassador for the WaveComBE project, conducting outreach to local schools, participating in the Sheffield Festival of Science, and engaging the public. During 2019-2021, she visited and undertook research trainings at Dublin City University in Ireland, the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, and the University of Twente in Netherlands. From Oct 2019 to Jul 2020, she was seconded to Televic Conference in Belgium, to model and compare centralized and distributed MIMO configurations under 60 GHz for serving multiple users in conference room settings. From Dec 2020 to Oct 2022, she collaborated with Dr. Mikko Uusitalo and Dr. Saeed Khosravirad from Nokia Bell Labs on the optimization of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) deployment in smart factories while considering the blockage effects in the 28GHz band. 

Meanwhile, she has been actively engaged in ITU-R standardization work as a delegate. She has also been an active reviewer for several Springer Nature journals, IEEE journals, a TPC member of IEEE flagship conferences, and a member of the IEEE Antenna and Propagation Society, IEEE Young Professionals, and IEEE Communications Society.