Professor Ping ZHANG
Chinese Co-Director of SCIBC
Position at TUFE: Doctoral Advisor, Professor (Public Finance), School of Public Finance and Administration, Tianjin University of Finance &Economics
Research interests
Public Financial Administration of Local Governments, Public Debt, Private and Public Partnership
Biography
Ping Zhang is Professor and Doctoral Advisor of Public Finance at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics and Co-director of Scottish Confucius Institute for Business and Communication at Heriot-Watt University. Her research focuses on public financial administration of local governments, especially risk management of public debt. She has been awarded two research projects supported by National Social Science Foundation of China which is the top official fund in China. She used to be a visiting scholar at Stanford University, USA. She is the author of Empirical Assessment and Governance Path on the Debt Risk of Investment and Financing Platforms of Chinese Subnational Governments (Tianjin People Press), Comparative Analysis of Chinese and Western Public Financial Actuality and Mechanism (Tianjin People Press). She is elected as High-level Innovative Talents by Tianjin Government. She has published more than 45 academic papers, and many of her work are cited by China Social Science Citation Index. She has been invited as a lecture presenter by many well-known international conferences, such as 32ND Annual Congress of the European Economic Association (Lisbon, Portugal, 2017), the G200 Youth Forum (Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, 2016), Asian Conference of Finance and Economics (Singapore, 2015).
Dr Isabel Hui Liu
Deputy Director
Scottish Confucius Institute for Business and Communication
Isabel Hui Liu received her MSc from Beijing Foreign Studies University in Simultaneous Conference Interpreting. She was awarded a PhD scholarship to study at Heriot-Watt University in Interpreting studies. She was appointed as the First Minister’s official interpreter and his Chinese advisor in 2007. She has accompanied the First Minister for his four official visits to China. As the Scottish Government interpreter, she has covered a wide range of ministerial level dialogues between China and Scotland including Chinese Prime Minister and vice Prime Minister’s official visits. She widely involved in work that promotes the relationship between China and Scotland and the Scotland’s China strategy for China.
Upon her PhD graduation, she started working as the International Policy officer at Universities Scotland to promote the internationalization of the Scottish universities as a whole. In 2011, she returned to Heriot-Watt University to lecture in Conference Interpreting, to develop new Chinese related courses and build international partnerships. She started to work on the Confucius Institute application for Heriot-Watt University in 2012 and was appointed as the deputy Director of Confucius Institute when the application was approved by Hanban in Nov 2013.
Isabel leads on operational planning and delivery of language training by the Institute.
Professor Ian Baxter
Heriot-Watt University Director