Zahra is an assistant professor at the University of Manchester in the Department of Computer Science. Her field of research is physics-based rendering and appearance modeling for complex materials such as cloth, hair, and fur. She worked as a research consultant at Disney Research and
before academia, she was an R&D at Industrial Light&Magic (ILM) and interned at Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks, and for two years at Luxion (makers of KeyShot). She holds a PhD and MSc from University of California, Irvine and a B.Sc. from the Sharif University of Technology in Iran.