Two major events in May honoured Professor Way Kuo, who has stepped down as CityU president after 15 years of distinguished service. A banquet themed “Fifteen Years Beyond Boundaries” celebrated Professor Kuo’s achievements since 2008 when he was appointed. Mr Lester Garson Huang, Council Chairman, presided over the event to which over 400 guests were invited, including former Council Chairmen, members of the Council and Court, local celebrities, CityU friends, donors and supporters, honorary award winners from overseas, senior management representatives from sister institutions, and the CityU management team, faculty and staff, alumni and students.

In addition, over 120 guests attended a gala dinner in honour of Professor Kuo hosted by the CityU Council and Times Higher Education (THE) in Kuala Lumpur. Attendees included CityU Council and Court members, distinguished alumni, senior management, eminent academics, representatives from academic partners in Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Brunei, representatives from HK Tech 300 funded start-ups, and high school representatives from Malaysia.

CityU researchers received 36 awards, including one Special Prize, three Gold Medals with Congratulations of the Jury, 17 Gold Medals, nine Silver Medals and six Bronze Medals at the 48th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva in April. This is the third year running that CityU has received the highest number of awards among local institutions.

A highly talented filmmaker and CityU alumnus won the Best New Director Award and the Best Original Screenplay Award at the 59th Golden Horse Awards for his first feature film, The Sunny Side of the Street. Malaysian-born Mr Lau Kok-rui came to Hong Kong to study marketing at CityU’s College of Business with a full scholarship for overseas students in 2008. His film tells the story of two Hong Kong immigrants from different generations, a middle-aged taxi driver who came illegally from mainland China, and a Pakistani non-refoulement claimant stranded in Hong Kong with his parents.

The Teaching Excellence Awards (TEA) for 2022/23 recognised the innovative approaches displayed by seven faculty members: Professor Kenneth Lo Kam-wing of the Department of Chemistry; Dr Tsui Lik-hang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and History; and the Veterinary Clinical Skills Team led by Dr Rebecca Parkes, Assistant Professor in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences (VCS). Dr Parkes’ team comprises Professor Vanessa Barrs, Dean of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC); Dr Gareth Fitch, Clinical Associate Professor, and Dr Kate Flay, Assistant Professor, both in VCS; and Ms Susanna Taylor, Scientific Officer, in JCC.

A CityU research team is pioneering advanced technology for next-generation self-design and manufacture of electron microscopes (EMs). An EM system composed of a pulsed electron source, a fast camera, a staged pumping vacuum system, and an aberration corrector has been developed by a team led by Professor Chen Fu-rong, Chair Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The team’s ultimate goal is to develop a miniature high space-time resolved “quantum” EM that can be used to study atom dynamics of beam-sensitive materials.

Nearly 500 participants joined the Employers’ Luncheon in March at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, marking the return of this highly acclaimed event after a hiatus since 2019. Among the attendees were close to 300 representatives from over 200 enterprises, including executives from multinationals and other organisations. Launched in 2015, the Luncheon boosts networking between CityU and industry, strengthens collaboration among CityU academics, students and enterprises, and helps employers and industry leaders to learn more about CityU.

A novel tunable terahertz (THz) meta-device that allows for signal delivery to specific receivers has been developed by a CityU team from the Department of Electrical Engineering and the State Key Laboratory of Terahertz and Millimeter Waves. The widespread adoption of such a device, made using advanced 3D printing technology, has implications for saving energy and protecting privacy.

This volume critically examines the philosophical thought of Im Yunjidang (1721–93), a female Korean Neo-Confucian philosopher from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), presenting her as a feminist thinker. Unlike most Korean women of her time, Yunjidang had the exceptional opportunity to be introduced to a major philosophical debate among Korean Neo-Confucians, which was focused on two core questions: whether sages and commoners share the same heart-mind, and whether the natures of human beings and animals are identical. In the course of engaging in this debate, she reformulated Neo-Confucian metaphysics and ethics of moral self-cultivation, culminating in her bold ideas of the moral equality between men and women and the possibility of female sagehood, suggesting that Yunjidang's philosophical thought could be best captured in terms of Confucian feminism.

This publication offers a compelling account of Myanmar's halting efforts to develop the institutional framework and practice of a parliament-based democratic governance between 2011 and 2021. It charts the stages of such a legislative resurgence, tracing its causes, and exploring how various institutional and political legacies both informed and constrained the re-establishment and operations of the Union legislature, or Pyidaungsu Hluttaw. Dr Egreteau investigates how parliamentary life (re)emerged in Myanmar in the 2010s.  His analysis concentrates on key legislative mechanisms, processes, and tasks pertaining to government oversight, budgetary control, representation and lawmaking and interrogates how they were learned, (re)appropriated and (mis)performed by Myanmar's new breed of legislators and parliamentary staff until the 2021 army takeover.