Viktoria Saklakova, a former Russian ballet dancer, serves as the main coordinator on China’s Science Island in Hefei. The 36-year-old is the head of international cooperation for the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei, Anhui province, sitting just meters away from the most advanced Tokamak in the world, the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST).
Visiting the Chinese city of Harbin (with its own Russian heritage) in 2006, where she also performed as a ballet dancer, Saklakova became fascinated with China, learned Chinese, and took a degree in physics at the Harbin Institute of Technology. She later acquired a doctorate at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei.
