Anna Gulyachkina

Anna Gulyachkina has been working at the European Spallation Source as a Detector Systems officer since October 2014. She has a degree in Economics and Management in Construction from Moscow Automotive and Road Building Technical University and additional education in International Accounting, Corporate Finance and Project management.

Before moving to Sweden from Russia she had been working for several years as a Financial controller and a Project Manager at Scania Finance Russia and Siemens VDO Automotive in Moscow, where she was mainly preparing financial reporting, forecasts, budgets, KPI analysis, costs calculations and systems optimization processes and was responsible for various Business Development projects.

- I joined the BrightnESS project in April 2016. My daily work includes assisting and supporting more than 20 members of the Detector Group and the BrightnESS project in Lund and Linköping in Sweden, in Daresbury in the United Kingdom, in CERN in Switzerland in administrative and financial activities. I prepare purchase and legal contracts requests, costs calculations, schedules and various documents, communicate with suppliers and partners, check reports and invoices and help with problem solving. Part of my work is an introduction for new members of the Detector Group and the BrightnESS project to administrative systems and routines at the ESS in order to help them to start working on the project activities as soon as possible after they join the ESS. In my everyday work it is important to pay attention to details and to know and follow rules and procedures, for example in preparing documents in order to prevent any delays in the next stages of processing them by other departments.

What I like most about BrightnESS is that the project will ensure optimization of technology, knowledge and skills transfer between European institutions and the ESS to obtain maximum technical performance.

In terms of key challenges, and since the project is time limited, I think at this stage for WP4 it is important to have an excellent work planning for the last months of the project, to follow the schedules and to avoid any unnecessary delays. For me it means that I should support my team in the most efficient way in order to minimize the time my colleagues need to spend for administrative, purchasing and financial activities, which will allow them to fully concentrate on working to fulfill WP4 goals, and to ensure that they receive required equipment, tools and components on time.

I think the main contribution of the BrightnESS project to neutron research is providing the recourses for development of ESS’s technologies and research infrastructure.