Yao received her B.S. in Physics in National Taiwan University in Taiwan in 2013, and came to Princeton to pursue her PhD on fluid mechanics with Professor Howard Stone in the complex fluids lab. Yao is interested in the physical understanding of fluid mechanics at low Reynolds number, especially the fluid motion involving interaction with elastic boundaries, which could be widely found both in nature and industry. She developed an original experiment model to study the cracking process of hydraulic fracturing, as well as the flowback driven by the reservoir elasticity. Recently she’s working on foam fracking, which reduces several environmental costs from liquid-fracking. Her goal is to use laboratory-scale experiments to capture the significant physics involved in the real systems.