Zia was an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, where she majored in mechanical engineering. After a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the
University of Michigan, she completed a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the
California Institute of Technology in 2011, supervised by
John F. Brady. Her dissertation was
Individual particle motion in colloids: Microviscosity, microdiffusivity, and normal stresses. Next, she became a postdoctoral researcher at
Princeton University, working with
William B. Russel. She became a faculty member at
Cornell University from 2013 to 2017, and then in
chemical engineering at
Stanford University, until returning to the University of Missouri as Wollersheim Professor in 2023. ==Recognition==