Five scholars honoured by RGC: CityUHK champions in the number of Senior Research Fellows awarded, including the first communication scholar

Five outstanding scholars from City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) have been awarded funding from the Research Grants Council (RGC) under the 2024/25 Senior Research Fellow Scheme (SRFS) and Research Fellow Scheme (RFS), receiving a total of over HK$34 million. Their research projects cover a diverse range of areas, including communication studies, machine learning, environmental science, biogenetics, and energy sustainability.

Three Chair Professors were awarded under the SRFS, the highest number among universities in Hong Kong. They are: Professor Christine Huang Yi-hui, from the Department of Media and Communication, Professor Jia Xiao Hua, from the Department of Computer Science, and Professor Wang Wen Xiong, from the School of Energy and Environment.

Professor Huang is the first CityUHK scholar to be awarded the SRFS in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Business Studies panel. She is also the first communication scholar to receive this prestigious accolade.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of institutional trust. Leveraging ongoing research projects encompassing over 40,000 samples from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK and the US, Professor Huang identified four groups of trustors: resilient trustors, tentative converts, cautious progressors, and persistent distrusters.

In this funded project, Professor Huang will further explore the individual and interactive effects of various situational factors via a longitudinal mixed-method approach. This approach will combine quantitative and qualitative methods as well as large language models to investigate institutional trust and trust cultivation strategies.

“By developing and testing the Situational Trust Dynamics Model, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how the public reacts to trust deficits and the effectiveness of trust-based strategies across diverse cultural and social settings,” said Professor Huang.

Professor Jia’s research has focused on issues related to distributed systems, data security and privacy for machine learning (ML).

Amid rising concerns over data security and privacy, the current cloud-based training of ML models no longer meet people’s needs in these areas. To address this problem, Professor Jia aims to open a new frontier for large-scale ML, where data scattered across the private sector globally can be fully utilised, unleashing the true power of artificial intelligence (AI).

“Federated Learning is a distributed ML method in which the training happens locally,” explained Professor Jia. “To make federated learning truly work, we need to ensure that each training client has the training data it claims to have, adheres to the specified training algorithm over the data, and cannot poison the global model with malicious output.”

There are increasing concerns regarding marine microplastics, which are produced during the environmental degradation of plastics released into the marine environment. However, the risks of these micro plastics to marine organisms are mostly unknown.

Professor Wang and his team focus on developing quantitative models that can predict the risk of these microplastics to marine organisms. They have developed novel technology that can track the transport of microplastics in living organisms. Based on these techniques, the team can then quantify the kinetics of microplastics.

“We are developing much more sensitive technologies that can detect microplastics in living organisms at very low environmental concentrations,” said Professor Wang. “With these advanced techniques, we are now trying to model the transport of microplastics in the organisms as well as their impacts.”

The RFS awardees are Professor Kwok Chun-kit, from the Department of Chemistry, and Professor Tso Chi-yan, from the School of Energy and Environment.

Professor Kwok has pioneered the innovative development of nucleic acid aptamers for targeting functional RNA structures, specifically RNA G-quadruplex(G4).

“Our team recently developed a number of original Systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment platforms and novel L-RNA aptamers,” said Professor Kwok, adding that this specific project aims to “further expand and advance L-aptamer technologies and tools to target RNA G4s and other important RNA structural elements in different biological systems for the first time.”

Supported by the funding, the laboratory will also establish a platform to identify and characterise RNA structure-targeting aptamers and engineer diverse aptamer-based tools for biological and therapeutic uses.

The research project led by Professor Tso aims to develop a smart building envelope system integrating passive radiative cooling and thermochromic smart windows technologies. The team has developed novel perovskite thermochromic smart windows with excellent properties and improved durability.

“Expanding on the accomplishments of our current work, our goal is to advance the widespread integration of self-adaptive passive radiative cooling ceramic materials and cutting-edge full-spectrum modulated thermochromic smart windows,” said Professor Tso. “These innovations will be complemented by AI-driven smart control strategies, with the overarching aim of commercialising these technologies for use in buildings.”

Professor Cheng Shuk-han, Associate Vice-President (Research), extended her heartfelt congratulations to all the winners. “The University believes their dedication to research excellence will lead to significant advancements in their respective fields, benefitting the community.”

The RGC has approved ten awards for each scheme in this round. Each SRFS and RFS awardee will receive a fellowship grant at around HK$8.0 million and HK$5.3 million, respectively, for a period of 60 months.