Bringing Industry Experience into her PhD: Introducing Jojo Wang

Jojo Mengzhu Wang is a PhD candidate in poultry nutrition at the Poultry Research Foundation (PRF) of The University of Sydney. Jojo completed her Master’s degree in ruminant nutrition from Shihezi University in China in 2016. During the last year of the degree, she collaborated with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, working on quality assessment of forage samples obtained from all Provinces of China. Her work led to the establishment of a national forage database.

After graduation, Jojo joined a company producing hydroponic forage as an R&D officer, providing fresh fodder to local farms unlimited by season and region. She then accepted a job as the customer service manager at the Shandong Lachance Group, which is the largest supplier of bile acids in China. After six years of work with a variety of customers across China, Jojo firmly understood the importance of rational use of resources and the value of R&D in the sustainability of food production systems.

Hence, at the beginning of 2023, Jojo gave away a highly paid job at Lachance in China and embarked on her PhD journey under the auspices of Associate Professors Sonia Liu and Peter Selle. Her PhD project focuses on the digestion kinetics of macronutrients, with non-bound amino acids, feed additives, and alternative feed ingredients as the core components. The aim is to improve resource utilisation, reduce feed cost and achieve sustainability. When I asked her how the first year of PhD had gone, Jojo answered, “while mastering the basics of research, I have learned things that may even be more valuable than the research project itself, ie., research integrity and ethics, teamwork and collaboration, and dissemination and extension of research outcomes”. Indeed, Jojo is a prime example of someone keen to learn new skills, reach out to others and extend a helping hand, and engage with industry. “My ultimate goal is to return to industry when I complete my PhD. I want to translate every bit of good research outcomes into practice because it is the only way that I see research is not wasted and research is used for industry development and global sustainability”, Jojo said.