Executive Director
Dr. Ying Zhou is the Executive Director of Tech Incubator at Queens College, CUNY. She is an ecosystem builder, a collaborator, and a co-creator. Ying supports entrepreneurs and startups by creating a collaborative and sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem that educates, engages, and inspires early-stage entrepreneurs to turn their ideas to ventures. She serves as a mentor to her students and an advisor to entrepreneurs and startups, with a focus on technology and innovation. Ying has over nineteen years of experience working on Technology Advisory engagements at PwC. She is passionate about cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration, innovation, design and design thinking, emerging technology, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems, and digital transformation.
When Ying Zhou was 15 years old, employed full-time as a lathe operator in a Sichuan factory, she could not imagine her future. “My education was very spotty after third grade,” says Zhou Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution had overturned the usual social expectations. The road from factory work in China to helping technology business entrepreneurs is both luck and lots of learning and determination.
Dr. Zhou earned an MBA, from Baruch College, CUNY, and her PhD in Accounting at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Fond as she is of technology, Zhou firmly believes in the value of in-person interaction. “I like to think of myself as the ‘Chief Collaboration Officer,’ connecting people with people and people with ideas,” she observes. “That’s how exciting things happen.”