Dr. Liang Zhao received the PhD degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing from the Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, School of Earth and Space Science, Peking University, Beijing China, in January 2013. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS), Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Department of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, United Kingdom. From 2016 to 2024, he was appointed as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer and the Director of Robotics in Health at UTS Robotics Institute (UTS:RI).

He is currently a Reader in Robot Systems in the Institute of Perception, Action, and Behaviour, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, since September 2024 and an Adjunct Associate Professor at UTS Robotics Institute. His current research interests include surgical robotics, simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), monocular SLAM (or Structure-from-Motion), aerial photogrammetry, optimisation techniques in mobile robot navigation and image guided robotic surgery.

He currently serves as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), and Area Chair for the International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions (IPCAI).