Xiaoxue Zhang

"According to the personality questionnaire, I am a mixture of the communicator, coordinator and influencer personality types. All of these are very important to my current job, where I perform research and development tasks and need to work with a variety of people. Being a good communicator and coordinator is critical to connect the dots that allow me to influence others and deliver my projects. "

"In my job, I design experiments, I do hands-on lab work, I coordinate tasks, I record and review experimental data to unpack learnings, and I share the results and learnings with a wider group. The work I do can result in a whole range of outcomes, including valuable learnings for future Research & Development, new ideas, processes and products, or improvements for the current processes and products. My job is never repetitive, and it is both challenging and very fun. A typical day can involve a mixture of meetings, hands-on work in the lab, emails and data handling. "

"I was born and grew up in China. I lived in Finland for nine years and I have now lived in the UK for seven years. I did my BSc in China and MSc/PhD in Finland. I have also done a few years of post-doc research in different universities both in Finland and the UK. I decided to focus on Research & Development in industry as I want to be closer to products."

"As a mother of two young kids, I don't have too much spare time on my hands. But I try to squeeze in some time to do sports to keep fit, and also to cook for my family. I can speak Chinese, English and Finnish. I’m married and my husband is my university mate from China. I have a nine-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter."

"I normally start my work day by having a simple breakfast as I arrive quite early to avoid traffic. After that I will take a cup of coffee to my desk, look through my emails and check my meetings for the day whilst I drink my coffee. Next, I will prioritise my tasks, make a quick time plan for the day and start to prepare accordingly. For a typical day, I would spend a couple of hours in the lab conducting hands-on tasks. I would have a couple of meetings with my teammates to discuss experimental results and plan for future tasks. I would then spend some time on recording and reviewing experimental results or communicating the results to relevant stakeholders using presentation slides or through a written reports. "

"I have a BSc of Materials Science from Beijing University of Technology, China. Then I achieved a PhD (with distinction) of Materials Science from Tampere University of Technology, Finland. After that, I went on to do post-doc research in Tampere University of Technology, University of Southampton, University College London and Imperial College London before moving to my current role to carry out innovation Research & Development in industry. "