News & Stories

Dr Jason Chan of the Chemistry Department is passionate about sharing knowledge with the new generation, but underpinning this obsession is love and respect for chemicals. He might look like an ordinary professor but Dr Jason Chan is a lively spark. The Hong Kong native is in the limelight promoting chemistry on TV shows including TVB’s “Scoop” and “Sidewalk Scientist”. However, he got a start in very humble beginnings, with home experiments in his washroom. “I’m a collector of the elements, and as a high school student I was once making bromine, a very corrosive liquid, for my elements collection and after sealing the liquid into glass ampoules, I found one had not been sealed properly,” he says.

From November 2nd to December 7th, 2015, the Library conducted a Services Quality Survey.   3,518 current students, faculty, and staff responded (~20% response rate).The Library achieved 7.01 for Perceived level of service, its highest ever (compared to 2011 and 2007).The Survey was a joint project of 6 libraries at UGC-funded institutions (JULAC libraries), using LibQUAL+?, a survey instrument developed by the Association of Research Libraries, widely adopted by libraries worldwide.Respondents? comments also provide useful feedback to us for making sustainable changes and developing services to meet users? needs. Of the 1,483 comments received, over 25% were solely positive, and many more combined suggestions with appreciation.  

There is no better proof of the University’s high-profile research focus and dedication to education innovation than its Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Through this program, students have the opportunity to engage in research projects under the guidance of world-class researchers at home and abroad, publish in leading international journals, and present at international conferences. Since its first launch in 2005, the program has helped myriad over 2,500 students to develop insightful perspectives in their chosen areas, for the demonstrable benefit of Hong Kong. 379 students and 142 professors participated in 292 projects in the 2015-16 academic year alone. And upon completion of the program, all students are eligible for entry into the annual UROP Awards.

Information literacy is a set of skills, attitudes, and behaviors that allows people to recognize when they want or need information, and then to search, locate, evaluate, manage, and use what they find effectively and ethically. It is tightly bound up with exercising ?the mind?s power to inquire freely.?   At the Library, we strive to help students develop these abilities. Part of these efforts lie in measuring how our students are doing; developing librarian?s abilities to do so; as well as joining with librarians across Hong Kong to help Hong Kong?s university students improve their information literacy.  

In the "Psychology of Environmental Sustainability" course, students from a variety of backgrounds worked in groups to address real-world sustainability issues on campus.

To address the meaningful connections among the disciplines, a new interdisciplinary Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology and Business (BIBU) program will be launched at HKUST in the 2016-17 academic year. The program, jointly developed by HKUST’s School of Science and School of Business and Management, is the first undergraduate program in Hong Kong which connects Biotechnology to Business. The interdisciplinary curriculum, which comprises about equal number of courses in science and business, equips students with a solid foundation of essential technical knowledge (life science, biotechnology) and business know-how (accounting, economics, operations management, and many others).

Big data, and the technology to mine information from it, is now one of the hottest terms in Information Technology. Multinationals, such as Intel, Google, and Alibaba, are pouring in large amount of resources into big data research every year, mining and analyzing the information, and then making adjustments to their corporate strategies accordingly.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and the University of Waterloo, Canada’s leading innovation university, will introduce dual doctoral degrees in engineering that will allow select students to simultaneously earn a PhD from each institution. Prof Tony F Chan, President of HKUST, and Prof Feridun Hamdullahpur, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waterloo, signed a memorandum of understanding establishing the new program at Waterloo on 7 October. The partnership, that will begin next year, forges a powerful academic alliance between leading universities in Asia and North America. “I am extremely proud to combine our innovation power to train the next generation of scholars and innovators,” said Prof Hamdullahpur. “This PhD education partnership will allow doctoral candidates from top notch Engineering Faculties to build a foundation on which to establish further academic and research collaborations.”