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HKUST 2014-2015
Annual Report
HKUST JOCKEY CLUB
INSTITUTE FOR
ADVANCED STUDY
The HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is committed
to drawing the world’s foremost intellectual talents to work with
HKUST academics and share their knowledge with the wider community
The Institute continued to serve as an international
knowledge hub for Asia, bringing together the world’s most
brilliant minds to drive cutting-edge research and discoveries.
INTELLECTUAL POWERHOUSE
The first three IAS Professors, all at the pinnacle of their
respective fields globally, participated in various activities on
and off campus. These included an IAS Commons talk on
the Chinese economy by IAS Helmut & Anna Pao Sohmen
Professor-at-Large and Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences
Prof Sir Christopher A Pissarides, an in-town dialogue
between IAS Bank of East Asia Professor Prof Ching W Tang
and more than 300 high school students on the future of
display technology, and a mini course on multi-wave imaging
for postgraduate students by IAS Si Yuan Professor Prof
Gunther Uhlmann.
Twenty prominent HKUST professors have now been
engaged as IAS Senior Fellows and IAS Fellows to promote
synergistic research on campus with the IAS professors
and visitors. IAS also enlisted four Junior Fellows and 14
Postdoctoral Fellows from various disciplines to work on
different research projects.
IAS Visiting Professors and Visiting Fellows, most of whom
are members of national academies or of equivalent
stature, have been invited to HKUST on a regular basis.
In the year under review, 22 Visiting Professors, six Senior
Visiting Fellows and six Visiting Fellows visited the Institute,
and collaborated and interacted with faculty and students
in different ways. The IAS HKUST-Scripps R&D Laboratory
led by Visiting Professor Prof Paul Schimmel from the
Scripps Research Institute, and Senior Fellow and Kerry
Holdings Professor of Science Prof Mingjie Zhang,
discovered metamorphosed protein building enzymes for
therapeutic use.
SHARING LATEST KNOWLEDGE
In 2014-15, IAS organized some 170 academic events,
including 52 distinguished lectures, 43 joint school lectures
and a UC RUSAL President’s Forum, attracting over 9,000
participants. Four Gordon Research Conferences were also
held at the Institute in Summer 2014, with three of the
world-renowned gatherings chaired by HKUST faculty.
Subjects spanned fields in life science, civil engineering
and chemistry.
To encourage the development of research clusters and
new initiatives, IAS arranged topical research programs in
specialized areas, such as neural engineering, scattering
amplitudes, creative Chinese writing, materials science,
high-energy physics, and statistics and the computational
interface to big data. Through short courses, workshops
and discussion, participants were able to gain a deep
understanding of the latest advances in the field.
