Qing Zhao is from Sichuan, China, where he received his B.S. in 1982 and M.S. in 1984 in Materials Engineering from Sichuan University (previously Chengdu University of Science and Technology). Thereafter, he worked several years as a faculty member at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Southwestern petroleum Institute, Nanchong, China. He was a graduate student at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University from January 1995 to August 1996 and received his M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering. He is now a graduate student for a Ph.D. at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Tribology is one of his major research interests. He has experienced in research on tribology of oil-field equipment for wear resistant applications, failure analysis, materials processing and design when he was in China. He also did research on tribology of polymer composites when he studied for his M.S. at Iowa State University. He is now working on the tribology of head/disk interface at Talke's group, Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR), UCSD. His research at CMRR includes numerical modeling of stiction and bump deformation of laser textured media, deformation mode analysis of head/disk contacts, environmental effects on the tribology of the head/disk interface, and disk lubricants. He is now working on tribology of ramp load/unload. Based on his research work, eight papers have been published plus one more submitted.