University of Nottingham Ningbo China student, Kaili Yu has obtained an offer to study at MIT. There she aims to develop lower cost machines for manufacturers while ensuring efficiency.

With numerous scholarships and honours, including 2018 National Scholarship and Excellent Student of Ningbo, Yu undoubtedly has a good academic background.

Growing up at her parents’ factory, Yu is familiar with machines and has a profound understanding of the difficulties which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often encounter.

Yu said: “The increasing costs of labour, severe environment protection inspections and lack of innovation has made obvious the loss of manufacturers’ traditional advantages as well as the significance of automation.” Her goal is to increase the cost performance and level of automation of machines to help the transition and upgrade of average SMEs.

This is reflected in Yu’s graduation project, which aims to build a low-cost screw fastening machine to reduce costs while ensuring efficiency.

Yu also spoke of her intern experience at Chery Jaguar Land Rover Automotive. Bored of processing the same statistics for 20 minutes, Yu developed a programme to output results within 3 minutes.

“I think it was my eagerness and detailed observation of the manufacturing industry, and my independent thinking and spirit of innovation that helped me to move on,” Yu said.