Senior appointment
Professor Gregory B. Lee has been appointed Chair Professor of Chinese and Transcultural Studies in the Department of Asian and International Studies and concurrently as Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He will assume duty on 2 August. Professor Lee received his bachelor’s degree and PhD from the University of London and he is currently the Deputy President/First Vice-President (Research) and Professor of Chinese and Transcultural Studies at the University of Lyon 3, France. His research expertise includes modern Chinese cultural and intellectual history, the politics of Chinese identity and popular culture. He is an expert member of the National Evaluation Agency (France) and a Fellow of the Institute for Cross Cultural Studies at Peking University.

Research grants
Two PhD students at CityU have been awarded Fellowships under the RGC–Fulbright Hong Kong Dissertation Research Programme for 2010–11. Song Yunya, a PhD candidate in media studies in the Department of Media and Communication, received $99,840 to continue her research for eight months at the University of California, Berkeley on the perspectives and shifting practices of American correspondents who have worked in China. Hu Tao, a PhD candidate in materials engineering in the Department of Physics and Materials Science, has received $74,880 to pursue his studies for six months at the University of Michigan on the characterisation and properties of surface nanocrystallisation of nickel-titanium shape memory alloy as a biomaterial.

Book Fair
CityU Press is participating in the Hong Kong Book Fair from 21 to 27 July at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Wanchai. The publication arm of the University will launch 10 new books and will display more than 110 publications at discount prices. The booth will be located at 1D-A28, University Press Square, Exhibition Hall One.

Kudos

Chair Professor-at-Large John Giesy of the Department of Biology and Chemistry has been elected as a 2010 New Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). Professor Giesy is concurrently a Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. The RSC consists of nearly 2,000 Fellows who are selected by their peers for their outstanding contributions to the natural and social sciences, in the arts and in the humanities. Election to the position of Fellow in the Society is considered one of the highest academic accolades available to scientists and scholars in Canada.

Chair Professor Zhang Longxi of the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics has been invited to contribute to a special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. The issue will feature responses from renowned scholars, including Professor Zhang, from the universities of Aberdeen, Auckland, California, Cambridge, Toronto and Washington plus the Collège de France, Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin to a specially commissioned essay on history and human nature written by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, Scholar in Residence at the Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

Two CityU graduates and a Year 3 student won the Best of the Best Award at the HSBC Young Entrepreneur Regional Awards 2009–10 in Malaysia last month. Kunal Parwani, formerly of the Department of Marketing, Eric Chen Zixiang, formerly of the Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, and Flex Yang Zhou, a Year 3 student from the Department of Accountancy, beat more than 1,000 teams from the region with their proposal for an innovative transgenic fish testing method based on technology pioneered at CityU. With a similar business idea, the team won the HSBC Young Entrepreneur Awards 2009–10 earlier this year, and Kunal and Eric placed 3rd in the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition at Singapore Management University on 8 July.