A warm welcome to Ms Zhirong Zhang, who is visiting us for a 12-month PhD visit, supervised by Dr Jin Zheng. Zhirong is a third-year PhD student at the School of Information Engineering, Chang’an University, China, where she is supervised by Prof Yong Fang. Her visit to Bristol is funded by China Scholarship Council (CSC). While at Bristol, Zhirong will be exploring optimization and GNN applications in finance.