On November 12, 2025, Taotao Cao successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis "Ordinal sums of various mathematical structures: ordered semigroups, quantales and t-norms on bounded lattices" at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi'an Jiatong University, Xi'an, China. She was awarded the title of Doctor of Mathematics. Taotao was supervised by Xiaochuan Liu and Bernard De Baets. She spent one year at KERMIT supported by the China Scholarship Council.