Ethan Shaojian Yang (杨劭坚) was born in Zhangzhou, China, in 1997, where he spent his childhood and the first five years of primary school. In the summer of 2008, he moved to Xiamen, China, where he completed his final year of primary school and six years of secondary school. He received the B.S. degree in Communication Engineering from Tiangong University, Tianjin, China, in 2019, and the Ph.D. degree in Ocean Technology and Engineering from Ocean College, Zhejiang University, Zhoushan, China, in 2025, under the supervision of Professor Fengzhong Qu (瞿逢重) and co-supervision of Associate Professor Yan Wei (魏艳).

He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the State Key Laboratory of Ocean Sensing, Zhejiang University, with a joint appointment between the College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering and the ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Center. He works under the supervision of Professor Guanding Yu (余官定) and Professor Fengzhong Qu (瞿逢重). His research interests include underwater acoustic communications, distributed acoustic sensing, and the ocean Internet of Things.

He pioneered a groundbreaking infrastructure-free architecture for wide-area ocean data backhaul, solving a long-standing critical challenge in extreme marine environments such as the deep open ocean and polar regions—areas where traditional surface buoy relays and seabed hydrophone deployments are simply not feasible. This innovative solution has been thoroughly tested and validated through multiple successful sea trials. He was instrumental in developing a next-generation underwater acoustic communication system that set a new global performance benchmark for its class. This breakthrough was recognized as one of China’s Top Ten Marine Science and Technology Advances and was prominently featured on the front page of China Science Daily.

He has published or accepted more than 20 peer-reviewed academic papers, among which 8 are as the first or corresponding author. He has filed 25 national invention patents in China, with 21 already granted. His research achievements have been recognized with the First Prize of Zhejiang Provincial Technological Invention Award and the First Prize of Science and Technology Award from the China Institute of Communications (CIC). He has been an IEEE Student Member since 2020 and became an IEEE Member in 2024. He is also a Member of the CIC and the Chinese Institute of Electronics (CIE).

Ethan chose the name “Ethan” himself and uses “Shaojian Yang” in formal documents. Outside of academia, he enjoys traveling, reading, and connecting with people from diverse backgrounds. He has lived in or visited 64 cities across China and has also had opportunities to travel to Japan and Australia for academic conferences.