Ying Zhou, born in Shanghai, studied architecture and structural engineering at Princeton University from 1994 to 1999 with Liz Diller, Peter Eisenman, Beatriz Colomina, and Mark Wigley. After working at the structural engineering firm of Guy Nordenson and Associates in New York from 1999 to 2001 on projects including the MIT Simmons Hall and the MoMA addition, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Stuttgart from  2001 to 2002. During a short stint in Detroit, her interest in technology and perception resulted in a 16mm short film about the city. She subsequently began studying for her Master's degree in architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard from 2003 to 2007, where she worked for her thesis on MetroBasel with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. She has worked in Shanghai for MADAspam in 2004 and was part of the competition-winning team TDI that realized a prototype house for post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka in 2005. She also organized the AsiaGSD series entitled 'Specific Weights of Architecture: Asian Probes' in 2006 and worked as a first-year studio and history/theory instructor at the Boston Architecture College from 2006 to 2007. At Studio Basel, she produced a comic book about MetroBasel which came out in German, French and English, as well as in Chinese in 2009. She also taught the studios on Kolkata, Damascus and Cairo from 2008-2011 and was part of an exhibit about the contemporary urban developments in the Middle East at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2010.