In Ting Zhang’s opinion, her achievements
are inseparable from the consistent support and respect of her parents, which
has made her a habit of learning, thinking, and planning creatively. Such
characteristics have had a profound impact on her research path.
There are two main driving forces for Ting
Zhang in embarking on the road of scientific research. The first is a LIDAR
project she participated in during her master's degree.
“Finding problems, then thinking, studying, and solving them brought
me the first taste of scientific research. I found it joyful and intriguing,”
Ting Zhang recalled. “But I also found that the depth and breadth of scientific
research in undergraduate was not enough, so the idea of continuing education
was born.”
While pursuing her Ph.D. degree in France,
the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering was her primary
focus. She explored the application of inverse scattering in the label-free
optical far-field super-resolution microscopic imaging technology.
In 2013, Ting Zhang first developed a
label-free optical digital microscope, namely tomographic diffractive
microscopy (TDM). Three years later, she further improved the resolution of TDM
to 1/10 of the wavelength, which far exceeds the diffraction limit and is comparable to fluorescent microscopies. These achievements significantly
enlarged fields of application of TDM and set a landmark in optical far-field
imaging.
When looking for job opportunities in
China, Ting Zhang ushered in the second turning point on the road of scientific
research: the Underwater Acoustic Team of Zhejiang University. Their research
around detection and imaging of underwater targets has opened a new door for
her.
After joining the team, Ting Zhang
participated in two major national scientific research projects. The research mainly focused on ocean environment observation using sources of
opportunity and data-based underwater target localization and classification.
To see through the ocean, one must first
"illuminate" it, that is, to understand the marine environment and
detect marine targets. Ting Zhang chose to start with environmental sound
sources such as shipping noise and wind-driven noise and combined them with a
distributed sensor network. In this innovative research, fundamental theories
and methods for distributed remote sensing networks will be developed, which is
of great significance to the establishment of applied underwater acoustic
sensing networks in typical ocean areas while enriching the theory and
methodologies of acoustic remote sensing.
Also, Ting Zhang is engaged in the research
on the localization, detection, and classification of bottom-laid targets in
shallow water. Through ocean acoustic techniques, she proposed to use the towed
array to study bottom-laid targets and reconstruct scattering characteristics.
For target classification and identification,
she has developped a method to extract the scattering signature of targets using holographic array processing and retrieved the
frequency and angle scattering pattern at low frequencies. Her novel
frequency-domain, data-based deconvolution method to remove the channel
distortion on the target scattering function opens new possibilities in the
field.
