A warm welcome to Pengcheng Gao, who joins us this month to begin his PhD studies, supervised by Dr Jin Zheng, Dr Wei Wei, and Prof John Cartlidge. Pengcheng received an MSc in Data Science with Distinction from the University of Southampton, ranking first in his cohort. He then undertook a nine-month internship at MiniMax, working primarily on post-training for the M2 and M3 series of large language models. Pengcheng’s PhD is funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) - University of Bristol (UoB) PhD Scholarships Programme, and his research will explore applications of Agentic AI and large language models to financial trading.