Ziliang Qiao received his bachelor's degree in Electronics and Information Engineering in July 2010 and master's degree in signal and information processing in April 2013, both from Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. His bachelor graduation project is to develop a simulation system for real-time underwater target detection and parameter estimation. His master thesis focuses on robust DOA estimation algorithm in impulsive noise environment.

Since September 2013 he is conducting research as an external PhD candidate of SPG, TU Darmstadt in the Institute of Water-Acoustics, Sonar-Engineering and Signal-Theory (IWSS) at the Hochschule Bremen (City University of Applied Sciences). His research is supported by a Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship under the State Scholarship Fund of China. He is working towards his PhD degree on the application of compressive sensing for active and passive Sonar applications, and he is especially interested in high resolution synthetic aperture sonar imaging.