Speaker: ZHANG Kouer
Outstanding RPg Student Award of PolyU Department of Mechanical Engineering 2024
Supervisor: Prof. AN Liang
Co-supervisor: Prof. ZHANG Xiao
Kouer is a final-year PhD candidate and the Outstanding Research Postgraduate Student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at PolyU. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Xi’an Jiaotong University before joining PolyU in 2022, where she is supervised by Prof. AN Liang and co-supervised by Prof. ZHANG Xiao.
Over the past four years, she has juggled three parallel tracks. Her research focuses on electrochemical conversion, which turns wastewater pollutants into useful ammonia and finally leads to several papers and patents. Outside the lab, she has been a member of the Hong Kong national rowing squad since 2022, balancing early morning training with PhD life and competing in events such as the Asian Rowing Cup, U23 Asian Championships and Around the Island Race (45 km). In 2025, she also co-founded a startup, NanoPulse Energy, to explore commercializing her research, learning along the way about patents, investor meetings, and why costs matter.
Her ability to explain complex research in plain language has been recognized through awards including champions of the Faculty of Engineering Three Minute Thesis Competition (2024) and the IOM3 Young Person's Lectures Hong Kong Region (2025). In this seminar, she will share some stories from these four years and a few lessons learned along the way.
Abstract
When Kouer started her PhD at PolyU four years ago, she expected to spend long hours in the lab—but she didn't anticipate that the journey would also lead her to represent Hong Kong in international rowing competitions, or to start a company along the way. In this seminar, she will share how these different pieces came together, sometimes by choice and sometimes by chance.
She will walk through how she found her way into electrochemical research after her undergraduate studies in Xi'an, and what the transition to Hong Kong was like. The lab work itself has had its ups and downs, experiments that worked on the first try, and others that took months to figure out. She will talk about navigating these challenges and sharing interesting viewpoints on finding future positions. Beyond the research, Kouer will share how she ended up joining the Hong Kong national rowing team while doing a PhD, which meant 5 am training sessions before lab work and learning to recover from losses as much as celebrating wins. Along the way, she also found herself starting a company, NanoPulse Energy, which taught her a completely different set of skills: filing patents, talking to investors, and trying to explain science to people who don't care about catalysts.
This will not be a talk about how to win awards or publish papers. Rather, it is a reflection on what these four years have been like—the unexpected turns, the people who helped along the way, and the questions she is still figuring out.
