Ex-Microsoft and Baidu Leader Joins WPP Board

Marcoms giant WPP has appointed former Baidu President and Microsoft China Chairman Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang as a Non-Executive Director on its Board, with effect from 1st January 2021.

Zhang (pictured) joins after five years at Chinese web site and search engine Baidu, where as President he was in charge of the company's tech, autonomous driving, cloud computing, education, AI2B and international business. Prior to this he spent nearly sixteen years at Microsoft in both the US and in China; latterly serving as Corporate VP, and Chairman in China. Earlier, he was Corporate VP, Mobile and Embedded Products, and MD / Chief Scientist in Beijing. During his career with Microsoft, Zhang also built an R&D centre with more than 3,000 scientists and engineers specializing in multimedia, computer vision, AI/machine learning, speech recognition and machine translation.

In addition, he was recently named Chair Professor of AI Science at Tsinghua University, and is the founding Dean of the Institute for AI Industry Research at the same university. Commenting on the appointment, Roberto Quarta, Chairman of WPP, said: 'Dr. Zhang is one of the world's most celebrated technologists and business leaders. With his diverse career experience which includes leadership roles at both US and Chinese companies, and his particular understanding of the changing consumer technology landscape within China, he will make an extremely valuable contribution to the WPP Board'.

Web site: www.wpp.com .