4
HKUST 2011-2012 Annual Report
PRESIDENT’S
REPORT
2
012 is the first year in our third decade.
Even as the sounds of the 20th anniversary
celebrations fade away, our people are already
busy making inroads in many areas in research,
teaching, partnership and reputation building.
Speaking of reputation, we are in the news
again. For a second year in succession,
QS
has ranked HKUST Asia’s number one
university. Although I have said on more
than one occasion that we are not in the
business of pursuing rankings, they are
nevertheless an international affirmation of
how far we have come. It is a fact of life that
the higher we rank, the greater the interest in
our university, as evidenced by the constant
stream of national, regional and international
visitors to our campus.
But we are not waiting idly for potential
partners to come to us. In pursuit of our
global strategy, I made an eight-day visit
to leading universities and institutions,
including CERN and WEF in Western Europe
last October. In February, with the deans
forming a larger delegation, we went calling
at some of the top-ranked universities on
the Canadian and US west coast on a five-
day, seven-university whirlwind visit, which
included calling on the Executive Chairman of
Google. These and similar outreach efforts
are now bearing fruit, resulting, for example,
in a summer research exchange program
with MIT, and visiting student agreements
with Oxford and Harvard, following my visits
there in May and October 2011 respectively.
This year alone, HKUST has entered into no
fewer than 42 university-level and school-
level agreements with top-tier universities
worldwide. We are pursuing strategic
partnerships with several leading global
