News & Stories

Fion LEUNG, a 2010 business administration graduate at HKUST, knew she would not want a long-term career in the financial sector while she was working as an analyst at a global investment bank. Rather, getting more people into volunteering and nurturing children and young people gave her much more satisfaction than advancing her coveted career. She soon branched out and pursued entrepreneurship based around what she thought was meaningful, and sought greater exposure and ideas together with her friend WONG Suet-Yi. While attending networking events to make useful contacts and more friends on the same wavelength, both young ladies felt awkward about approaching industry leaders. And they realized that their feelings were common, like her peers, being fresh out of college and also desperate to build a career but having no mentors they could ask for advice.

From fundamental discoveries to knowledge transfer and application, you can find all the latest breakthroughs we have done in this issue of Research@HKUST.

Graduated with a BSc in Mathematics in 2011, Lancelot SHIR has taken a sweet and varied journey in life. A few years after graduation, Lancelot already had success with his first business — a tutorial center teaching mathematics — which he funded with two years of hard work of working. As a local rock star tutor, it could have been all maths for Lancelot with his tutorial business achieving great results. However, he encountered a health problem in 2017 due to massive work pressure, and his life took an unexpected turn.  “I was suffering from a stomach problem and a friend of mine suggested I used raw honey to treat the problem. It worked a treat and I was suddenly catapulted into the world of honey and bees – I couldn’t stop learning and it changed my life,” he says.

Students attending the classes of Prof. Julian GROVES of the Division of Social Science understand that switching off and putting away their electronic devices is mandatory—even the use of laptops or tablets for note-taking are discouraged—because Prof. Groves reckons that while the internet can be an important resource for educators, “mobile devices can be a terrible distraction to classroom learning”. The students might not like it at first, but they rarely complain about it because they are offered “something equally compelling in return” which involves many interactive activities such as surveys, quizzes, simulations, and discussions to keep them engaged.

A research team led by scientists from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) unveiled a first-in-kind study of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and its role in the rise and fall of airborne sulfates in hazy air pollution, offering policymakers new insights into ways to tackle smoggy weather.  Dense, hazy fog episodes characterized by relatively high humidity, low visibility and extremely high PM2.5 have been a headache to many megacities including those in Mainland China. Among pollutants that are less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5), airborne sulfate is one of the most common components of hazy air pollution formed atmospherically via the oxidation of sulphur dioxide (SO2).  

HKUST has been committed to enrolling students from around the world to foster campus diversity and advance internationalization. To continue broadening the non-local student mix, the University introduced a “Counselor Fly-in” program in 2018 to let high school counselors from Central Asia and Middle East have a deeper understanding of what opportunities HKUST can offer to their students. The program continued in March 2019 with some 30 high school counselors from nine Western European countries joining. Here we meet two students from Kazakhstan and Turkey who share with us what brought them to Hong Kong. Fourth-year Biotechnology and Business student Kamila ABDRASSILOVA from Kazakhstan witnessed the increasing number of students from her home country – when she started, there were only seven and now the number has doubled to 14.

An international research team led by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has demonstrated that cooling by internal waves could potentially create thermal refuges for coral reefs, and may help prevent and more accurate predict locations of coral bleaching. Coral reefs around the world are threatened by pan-tropical bleaching events caused by rising seawater temperatures linked to ongoing climate change and extreme conditions like El Niño.  However, bleaching patterns can be hard to predict, especially in deeper water.  Currently, most bleaching predictions are based on surface estimates of seawater temperatures gathered with satellites.  While satellite observations are important for understanding large-scale patterns and studying remote locations, they are only able to detect temperatures at the very surface of the ocean and provide averages over relatively large scales.

Prof. ZHAO Tianshou, Cheong Ying Chan Professor of Engineering and Environment, Chair Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of Energy Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has been elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) – bringing the total number of CAS members at HKUST to five. CAS membership is the highest academic recognition conferred by the Chinese government for science and technology research achievements. Only scientists who have made significant contributions to the advancement of science can be nominated, and they require the support of more than two third of the members from their own division in order to be elected.  Among the 64 members and 20 Foreign members elected for 2019, Prof. Zhao is the only academic chosen from Hong Kong under the Technological Sciences division, for his achievements in engineering thermos-physics and clean energy production.