Postgraduate Research Student Profiles

Xuejun graduated with a BA and MA in Computer Science, both from University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China. She is now continuing her studies at Manchester as a PhD student in the School of Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Group.

"After working for one year as a software engineer in a large telecommunication company in China, I wanted to do something challenging. I decided to take on further study at the research level. The first country I'd thought of was the UK because the esearch in UK is of world-class level and qualifications obtained in the UK are recognised and respected by all other countries. Manchester University is among the best universities in UK. In addition to the reasonable living cost in Manchester, there is a large China town right in the city centre, which is easy to access. Also, there is a large population of Chinese in Manchester, so I knew that I wouldn't feel lonely during my studies.

The application process was very easy and on arrival I settled into my research group easily. Every member in the group is nice. We have regular meetings to discuss everything we are interested in. I benefit a lot from those discussions. The school also provides training to improve our skills on presentations and academic writing.

My PhD project is a very good interdisciplinary one in the area of Bioinformatics, which lies at the interface between Computer Science and Biology. I've received continuous help and guidance from my supervisor. We've developed a series of new methods in our area which are a significant improvements on other previous approaches. We have collaborations with biologists and other bioinformaticians from Manchester University and other universities around the world. During my study, I've attended several meetings and workshops to present my work. I luckily won the 2nd prize for my poster at the International meeting of the Microarray Gene Expression Data Society, Norway, in September 2005. I also published three research papers, and two of these are in the best journal in my area (Bioinformatics). One of them won the Best Paper Prize from the school in November 2005.

The best thing about the University is that it has a large number of hard working researchers and has very good co-operation atmosphere. Working with these people has led to my improvement in my ability to do research, academic presentation skills and the spirit of working with others. I'm sure I will benefit a lot from all of these in my future career."