Brains and brawn, muscular China academic offers free personal training to PhD candidates

BEIJING: An associate professor at a prestigious university in China has posted videos of her working out in the gym to recruit chemistry PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows.

Yang Xuemei, 31, from Harbin Institute of Technology’s Shenzhen campus in southern China began posting videos of herself training in gyms and showing off her muscles as “advertisements” to recruit new students on September 30.

In one video, Yang says: “Hello my future students, your doctoral supervisor is doing a 15kg weighted pull-up for you.”

Yang, from southwestern China’s Sichuan province, calls herself an “intellectual shrew” and a “Sichuan tyrannosaurus”.

Her university profile shows that she graduated from Nanjing University in eastern China’s Jiangsu province in 2015, and obtained her PhD in chemistry at Texas A&M University in the United States in 2020.

Her research area specialises in organometallic chemistry.

Yang joined Harbin Institute of Technology in 2022 after finishing her postdoctoral research at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Yang said she was inspired by her father, who had been a fitness fanatic since she was young.

She began working out while studying in the US.

Yang said she also suffered from anxiety and amnesia due to heavy study pressure as a PhD candidate, but working out helped her get through a “dark and painful time”.

“Fitness training is painstaking, but the human body releases endorphins and dopamine that brings you joy,” she said.

The elective course Charismatic Chemistry, in which she introduces chemical reactions that take place in the body during exercise, is one of Yang’s signature courses.

She also encouraged women at her class and online to ditch the unhealthy skinny beauty ideal and pursue a lifestyle that values fitness and happiness.

Yang said on social media that she works out seven days a week.

She said training boosted her energy which benefited her research and teaching.

She offered free private training for her future students aside from tutoring their chemistry research, but she said she had not met a student who was also into working out.

Yang added that she would not bully her students or give them an overtaxing workload.

She said she would only push herself in training, adding that her next goal is to “become the world’s most muscular professor”.

Yang has attracted 25,000 followers online, with many expressing their admiration.

“She is a true master of pen and sword,” one said, citing an old Chinese idiom that describes all-rounders.

Many chemistry students flocked to her account asking her if they could be one of her students.

“I can get a PhD tutor and private trainer at the same time, what a great deal,” one person quipped. – South China Morning Post