Dr ZhiMin Xiao

Biography

Passionate about education programmes that unbar the gate without lowering the bar and opportunities for lifelong, professional, and interdisciplinary learning, I re-trained and up-skilled in Data Science and Medical Anthropology, a spirit that is in tune with the UK Government’s strategy to train, re-train, and up-skill the Country’s workforce through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement. Motivated by social problems such as inequities in health and education and structural violence such as poverty, racism, injustice, and human rights abuse, I joined the School of Health and Social Care at the University of Essex in 2021. For years, my research revolved around evidence generation, synthesis, and communication, on topics about education, child and adolescent health and wellbeing. Increasingly, I am interested in trauma-informed and rights-based approaches to research into the same topics and the extraordinary stress of ordinary life, to which different people respond in different ways. As a social data scientist, I look back on the past in order to look better into the future. This means I examine both qualitative and quantitative data generated in the past, identify patterns, derive insights, make (factual or counterfactual) predictions, so as to construct richer understandings of the past and/or inform better decision-making for the future. Understanding well what we observe right in front of our eyes is usually ethnographically invisible, I employ mixed methods in my research and often draw on inspirations from Medical Anthropology and value lived experiences, elements that are often difficult to measure or resist measuring. As a research methodologist in Education, Health, and Social Care, I have collaborated with colleagues from multiple disciplines. Prior to joining Essex, I worked at Durham University on an Education Endowment Foundation-funded project where we (re-)analysed datasets from many large-scale school-based randomised controlled trials aiming to improve health and educational outcomes for children and young people. In the past few years, I proposed an individualised approach to impact/treatment evaluation. By demonstrating where an intervention/treatment worked, for whom, and by how much, using observational and experimental datasets collected from large-scale and often longitudinal studies, the individualised approach I have been working on has implications for not only policymakers in education, public health, and other government services, but also decision makers in clinical settings.

Qualifications

• PhD Durham University,

• MA, MPhil University of Cambridge,

• MSc, MSc University of Oxford,

Appointments

University of Essex

• Senior Lecturer, University of Essex (2021 - present)

• Elected Member of Senate, University of Essex (1/2/2025 - present)