New appointments
Professor Henry Chung Shu-hung, currently Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been appointed Dean of Students, with effect from 1 September. Reporting to the Vice-President (Student Affairs), Professor Chung will advise on and implement policies relating to student affairs, promoting student success and coordinating student development and support across related administrative units. He will liaise between the University and student organisations and play an important role in the implementation of the Strategic Plan on student development and learning.
Professor Ian McKeague has been appointed Chair Professor of Biostatistics and concurrently Head of the Department of Biostatistics, effective from 1 September. Professor McKeague received a BA, MA and MMath from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US. He is a globally renowned statistician and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and American Statistical Association. His research interests include post-selection inference, functional data analysis, empirical likelihood methods, survival analysis, non-standard asymptotics, and competing risks models.
New Faculty Orientation 2021
The New Faculty Orientation 2021, organised by the Human Resources Office, was held on 3 September. President Way Kuo delivered the opening remarks and Professor Christian Wagner, Provost, and Professor Julie Li Juan, Associate Provost (Academic Affairs), provided an overview of the University and discussed how to build a successful career at CityU. There were also sessions on teaching and learning, quality assurance, research, postgraduate studies, PhD matters, and Mainland Joint PhD schemes.
Croucher Foundation
Professor Alex Jen Kwan-yue, Lee Shau Kee Chair Professor of Materials Science and Chair Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science, received a grant worth HK$600,000 from the Croucher Advanced Study Institute 2021/22 to organise high-level lectures for scientists on “Frontiers of Organic Semiconductors from Challenges to Opportunities”.
The Croucher Foundation also approved support for CityU proposals for two conferences in 2021/22: the 2nd International Conference on Biodiversity, Ecology and Conservation of Marine Ecosystems 2022, organised by Professor Kenneth Leung Mei-yee, Director of CityU’s State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution and Chair Professor of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry; and the 2021 Joint Annual Conference of Physical Societies in the Guangdong–HK–Macao Greater Bay Area, organised by Dr Li Xiao, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics.
Ars Electronica 2021 Garden Hong Kong
Ars Electronica 2021 Garden Hong Kong is an extended programme of the Ars Electronica Festival at Linz, Austria. It was founded in 1979 as a premier international festival of art, technology and society. Over the past three decades, this world-renowned event has provided an annual setting for artistic and scientific encounters with social and cultural phenomena that are the upshot of technological change. 2021 Garden Hong Kong is the second iteration in which the Neuro Design Lab (supported by CityU’s Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media and the School of Creative Media, as well as the Osage Art Foundation) initiated and produced online exhibitions, symposia, panel discussions, and an experimental networking party to showcase and expand the media art scene in Hong Kong today. For more information, please visit here.
Kudos
Dr Jiang Yiqi, a PhD graduate from the Department of Computer Science (CS), and Wang Shuai, a PhD student in CS, together with their supervisor Dr Li Shuaicheng, Associate Professor in CS, received the Best Paper Award for their co-authored paper “A framework to trace microbial engraftment at the strain level during fecal microbiota transplantation” at the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine held virtually in August 2021.
Cheng Yuk-shing, Tang Chun-ki and Wong Tat-chee, final-year students in the Department of Electrical Engineering, teamed up to win three awards at three different innovation competitions. Their project “Aero-Hydroponic Agriculture IoT System” won Second Prize at the 7th Hong Kong University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, organised by the Hong Kong New Generation Cultural Association; Second Runner-up at HKETA Innovate for the Future, organised by the Hong Kong Electronics & Technologies Association; and Certificate of Merit in the HKIE Innovation Award 2021, organised by the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.