Professor Zhang Hua, Herman Hu Chair Professor of Nanomaterials in the Department of Chemistry, has been elected Foreign Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences in recognition of his highly interdisciplinary research, which has many promising applications for daily life. One particular area is the synthesis of ultra-thin two-dimensional nanomaterials, such as metal nanosheets, graphene, metal dichalcogenides, metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, among others, and their hybrid composites for use in a range of bio-engineering and nano-tech industries.

Professor Li Qiusheng, Chair Professor in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, has been awarded the 2020 Robert H. Scanlan Medal by the American Society of Civil Engineering. He received the prestigious award for his “outstanding contributions to wind engineering and structural mechanics from fundamental research to engineering applications”.

Dr Kwok Chun-kit (centre, front row), Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, won the Croucher Innovation Award 2019 from the Croucher Foundation. He has been recognised for his pioneering research on exploring the relationship between RNA (ribonucleic acid) and gene regulation as well as its link to human diseases such as cancer. His work has tremendous potential for scientific discoveries and applications.

The estate of the late Dr Chung Sze-yuen, GBM, JP, one of Hong Kong’s most influential figures, has made a significant donation of HK$15 million as a gift to establish the Sze-Yuen Chung Fund in support of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS). The bequest will be used to help recruit and retain top-notch scholars and promising early-career talent, enabling HKIAS to explore new horizons of knowledge and further expand academic and knowledge frontiers.

Professor Wang Xunli, Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Physics, has been elected Fellow of the Neutron Scattering Society of America for his “innovative neutron scattering studies at the interface between condensed matter physics and engineering materials science, and for the development of new neutron instrumentation to enable these seminal studies”. Professor Wang’s expertise lies in neutron and synchrotron scattering measurements. He applies these state-of-the-art experimental techniques to study phase transformation and deformation in advanced materials.

Dr Chow Kwan-ting, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, received the Croucher Innovation Award 2019 for her pioneering research on the anti-tumour activities of a rare immune cell type - plasmacytoid dendritic cells. The research findings provide insights into designing new generations of cancer immunotherapy with the potential to treat a variety of cancers, including those for which no treatment is currently available. Dr Chow seeks to understand how the immune system naturally fights cancer, why and when this defence breaks down, and how to stimulate the body to mount an effective anti-cancer response.

A materials scientist and his research teams are advancing the frontiers of renewable energy research with two significant inventions that tackle the looming energy crisis. Led by Professor He Jr-hau from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the inventions include the development of a novel wave energy device that generates energy while reducing carbon dioxide, as well as a new photoelectrochemical system that will increase the efficiency of solar-to-hydrogen energy conversion by two-fold and at half the cost.

The first experimental evidence of a Kondo cloud has been observed in research led by Dr Ivan Valerievich Borzenets, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. The Kondo cloud was theorised half a century ago but until now it has not been observed, according to Dr Borzenets, who works on the Kondo project as part of an international research team. Dr Borzenets is the lead author of an article titled “Observation of the Kondo screening cloud” published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

The realistic mechanical properties of monolayer graphene have been successfully studied by a new method developed by a research team led by Dr Lu Yang, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. This groundbreaking discovery will promote the application of graphene in different areas, such as the touch monitor on flexible mobile phones. Dr Lu’s research achievement has been published in the prestigious international journal Nature Communications, titled “Elastic straining of free-standing monolayer graphene”. This paper was also highlighted in “Editors’ Choice” in the 21 February 2020 issue of Science.

Pioneering CityU research has led to the development of the most efficient all-inorganic inverted perovskite solar cells (PVSCs) to date. This novel approach will contribute to addressing the global energy issue in a cost-effective manner. PVSCs are a type of solar cells produced by metal halide perovskite materials, which are an attractive option for the renewable energy technologies due to their high efficiency and low manufacturing cost. The findings were published in Nature Communications under the title “Highly efficient all-inorganic perovskite solar cells with suppressed non-radiative recombination by a Lewis base”. The team included Professor Alex Jen Kwan-yue, Provost of CityU and Chair Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science, Dr Zhu Zonglong, Assistant Professor in CityU’s Department of Chemistry, Wang Jing, PhD student, and Dr Zhang Jie, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Chemistry as well as collaborators in mainland China, US and Taiwan.

The College of Business (CB) at CityU has been ranked 27th in the world and top in the Asia-Pacific Region according to University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) Top 100 Business School Research Rankings 2019 released in February. This ranking is based on CB’s contributions to the top academic journals in 2019. In a five-year period ranking of 2015–2019, the College was ranked 36th at present on the basis of its research outcomes in the UTD rankings.

Also, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme in CB has entered the FT’s 2020 MBA top 100. The Financial Times rankings are widely recognised for listing the best management programmes worldwide.

As part of the fight against the pandemic, the Department of Chemistry has produced since February around 5,000 bottles of 75% alcohol-based handrub based on World Health Organisation recommendations. The handrub was distributed among the disadvantaged in society and CityU staff.

Learning from each other is the driving force behind internationalisation, commented President Way Kuo of CityU (pictured, far left) at a specially convened panel during an international meeting in India in January. The panel discussion was part of the Times Higher Education (THE) India Universities Forum at Amity University in Noida in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. President Kuo was invited to participate in the forum alongside higher education experts from India, the UK and US.

Court members were given a comprehensive overview of recent developments at the 15th meeting of the Court, in January. In addition to news about CityU’s ranking, research achievements and future projects aimed at further enhancing our reputation for excellence in higher education, the Court was briefed on our response to the social movement in Hong Kong in recent months.

Exercise and well-being have been internationally recognised with a Gold Campus Award for 2020 under the Exercise is Medicine® On Campus (EIM-OC) programme co-launched by the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Medical Association. Gold level campuses possess a referral system in which campus health-care providers evaluate physical activity among students and refer them, if necessary, to a qualified fitness professional, according to the EIM-OC committee. CityU won Silver Campus Awards in 2017 and 2019.

Mr Cheung Siu-hong, a graduate of the School of Creative Media, won the Best Art Direction award at the 39th Hong Kong Film Awards. He was the production and costume designer on the movie Fagara.

Mr Cheung is pleased to receive the award and says his studies at CityU helped him to develop an interest in art design in movies, which lay the foundation for his career. He graduated from CityU in 2004. A renowned art director in Hong Kong, he has worked on the production and costume design of many movies. He won the Best Makeup & Costume Design award at the Golden Horse Awards in 2017 for the movie See You Tomorrow.

Following Professor Barrington Moore Jr (an American political sociologist famous for his comparative study of modernisation in Britain, France, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and India), this book raises doubts about modernisation theory’s claim that an advanced economy with extensive social differentiation is incompatible with authoritarian rule. Authoritarian modernism in East Asia (Northeast and Southeast Asia) has been characterised by economically reformist but politically conservative leaders who have attempted to learn the “secrets” of authoritarian rule in modern society. They demobilise civil society while endeavoring to establish an “ethical” form of rule and claim reactionary culturalist legitimation. With China, East Asia is home to the most important country in the world today that is rapidly modernising while attempting to remain authoritarian.

This book aims to examine from a semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese conspire to encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in Chinese. With both being tonal languages, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese manifest different morpho-syntactic configurations to mark focus. A general principle governing focus marking in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese is given in the book, which aims to give a better understanding of the underlying principles the two use to mark additive and restrictive meanings, and related focus interpretations. Particular attention is also drawn to the co-occurrence of multiple forms of restrictive and additive particles in Cantonese, including adverbs, verbal suffixes and sentence-final particles. Linearity has been shown to be an important parameter to determine how focus is structured in Cantonese.