CityUHK to confer honorary doctorates on three distinguished persons

City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) will confer honorary doctoral degrees on three distinguished individuals in recognition of their significant contributions to education and societal well-being. The recipients, Dr the Hon Leung Chun-ying, GBM, GBS, JP, Professor Hiroshi Amano and Dame Madeleine Atkins, will receive their awards at the Honorary Awards Ceremony on 1 November. 

Dr the Hon Leung Chun-ying, Vice-Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), will receive an Honorary Doctor of Social Science.

Dr Leung is a graduate of Hong Kong Polytechnic and Bristol Polytechnic, United Kingdom (UK). He was previously awarded Honorary Doctorate degrees by five universities in the UK, Hong Kong, Shandong and Macao. 

Dr Leung holds national development and public affairs close to his heart. Starting in the late 1970s, Dr Leung participated in land and housing reforms in the Mainland. Following a constitutional amendment in 1988, he assisted mainland cities in land leasing matters on a voluntary basis. Between 1984 and 1997, Dr Leung was involved in the preparatory work for the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). From 1997 to 2011, he was a member of the Executive Council of Hong Kong and served as the Convenor of the non-official members between 1999 and 2011. In July 2012, Dr Leung took office as the fourth-term Chief Executive of the HKSAR. Since March 2017, he has been Vice-Chairman of CPPCC. 

Dr Leung has had a strong commitment to education development. He served as Council Chairman of CityUHK between 2008 to 2011. In 2022, under his leadership, Minxin Hong Kong School (Guangzhou Nansha) was founded, and Dr Leung served as Chairman of the School Board. He has actively promoted Hong Kong’s participation in the Belt and Road Initiative and holds prominent positions in related non-profit and non-governmental organisations, including Chairman of the Belt and Road Hong Kong Centre and the GX Foundation. 

Professor Hiroshi Amano, Professor and Director of the Center for Integrated Research of Future Electronics, Institute of Materials and Systems for Sustainability at Nagoya University, will receive an Honorary Doctor of Science.

Professor Amano is a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. He is an internationally acclaimed physicist and engineer in semiconductor technology. Born in Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, Professor Amano embarked on his academic and research journey at Nagoya University, where he received his Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Engineering.

In his freshman year, Professor Amano learned from his lecturer the meaning of the Chinese character “工”, which means engineering in English. The character’s structure resembles a bridge, symbolising the connection between people. Since then, Professor Amano has held the belief that the purpose of study is to benefit people, and he has aspired to change the world through research. In 1985, he developed low-temperature deposited Aluminium Nitride buffer layers, resulting in better quality Gallium Nitride (GaN), and made a significant contribution to the development of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Four years later, Professor Amano successfully fabricated the world’s first blue LED.

In 2014, Professor Amano received the Japanese Order of Culture. The same year, he shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics with Professor Isamu Akasaki and Professor Shuji Nakamura for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”. This invention is famed for bringing about the second lighting revolution. Additionally, he is a Fellow of the Engineering Academy of Japan, a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and an International Member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States.

Dame Madeleine Atkins, President of Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge, will receive an Honorary Doctor of Social Science.

Dame Madeleine graduated from Girton College, University of Cambridge, majoring in law and history. She subsequently obtained a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) from the University of Oxford and received a PhD from the University of Nottingham.

She began her career as a secondary school teacher before moving into academia and a research career at the University of Nottingham and Newcastle University, supervising Doctoral and Master’s students in education-management fields. She also ran short courses and consultancy programmes in higher-education policy and management for various national governments and agencies. Her research expertise lies in education management focusing, in part, on the use of new technologies to improve the effectiveness of learning and to support innovation in professional vocational training. Following senior positions at Newcastle University, she was the Vice-Chancellor of Coventry University for nine years.

Dame Madeleine has made significant contributions to the development of higher education in the UK. She was the former Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which was the Regulator of universities in England. HEFCE was also responsible for running the Research Excellence Framework and the Teaching Excellence Framework exercises across the UK as well as distributing core and project funding to higher education institutions. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge in 2015. She received Honorary Doctorate degrees from the University of Nottingham and the University of Gloucestershire in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and in recognition of her national contributions to the higher education sector, was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2018.