4 December 2014

Dear alumni,

Impressive transformations have taken place on CityU campus in the past 30 years. I wish to take this opportunity of our 30th anniversary to express my sincere appreciation to all of you for the staunch support and valuable contributions to your alma mater in these past 30 years. One of CityU’s academic goals is to excel in problem-based research to benefit industry, society and human well-being. I would like to share with you some excellent achievements we have made in this particular regard to reciprocate your staunch support.

CityU was ranked 3rd among the eight publicly-funded Hong Kong higher education institutions in terms of the total number of research projects awarded in this year’s research grants bidding exercise, organised annually by the Research Grants Council (RGC) under the University Grants Committee (UGC). Moreover, CityU was among the top three in terms of the number of grants and amount of funding in the Business Panel, the Engineering Panel and the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel. In addition, CityU won the largest number of grants among the eight institutions in the subject disciplines of Mathematics; Mechanical, Production & Industrial Engineering; Social Sciences; and Chemical Engineering.

I am particularly pleased to see that our young faculty have performed exceedingly well alongside the University’s senior scholars and researchers in these external grant application exercises. We won the largest number of grants among all eight institutions for the Early Career Scheme for the third consecutive year. This shows the outstanding quality of our young recruits who joined CityU in recent years, and their great promise for the future of the University.

What is also exciting to note is that in addition to our consistently high performance in science and engineering, CityU has, in the recent years, significantly enhanced the research capacity and funding success of our business school, life sciences and social sciences disciplines to engage in real world problems to work out innovative solutions with global and local impact, e.g. in the fields of cell research and biomedical robotics, healthcare management, climate change and sustainable city.

The scale of some of the research projects taking place at CityU is impressive, too. Professor Frank Chen, Head of the Department of Management Sciences, and his team won around $20.45 million this year from the Theme-Based Research Scheme of the UGC, a highly competitive scheme to support collaborative research that targets the development of Hong Kong and beyond. Professor Chen’s project tackles the delivery of 21st century healthcare which has both local and global application significance. CityU is the Principal Investigator of this inter-disciplinary and cross-institutional project. It brings together experts in management science, systems engineering, and public health from Columbia University in the US and at least three other local universities in Hong Kong to build a “Quality-and-Efficiency Driven System” for healthcare operation management.

It is most timely that the City University of Hong Kong Foundation was launched at the Anniversary Banquet last month, thanks to the dedicated efforts of many strong supporters of the University. The Foundation will serve as a major platform for boosting our networks and financial capacity to support the pursuit of academic and research excellence to benefit our society. I would particularly like to thank Dr Peter Ho and Mr James Liu for serving on the Board of Governors of the Foundation, and I hope more alumni will support this initiative to enhance teaching and learning at CityU.

These good news stories are a fitting finale to our anniversary year. I am very proud of the achievements of our colleagues and our University. I thank our alumni and alumni groups who have played a valuable role advising us on our development and helping us achieve our goals. The CityU Homecoming Gala cum 30th Anniversary Closing Ceremony at the end of November, which brought together over 3,000 alumni, staff, students and their families, was another spectacular and memorable event, showing our strong bonding and solidarity as members of one big CityU family.

So that leaves me just enough space to wish you all Season’s Greetings and a prosperous 2015. Thank you for your continued, highly valued and much appreciated support!

Way Kuo

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