“I became interested in how the mind works when I was about 15 years old, back in Germany,” says Professor Benjamin Becker.

“I wanted to know what happens when emotions dysregulate, because in my environment there were people with mental disorders. I wanted to know how they felt, what has gone wrong in the minds of people who cannot control their emotions.”

Now Dr Becker is a neuroscientist, a professor at the Department of Psychology at HKU where he is the director of the Neuroscience of Cognition, Affect and Motivation Lab (N-CAM). Before joining HKU he worked in Neuroscience and Life Science Centres in Bonn (Germany) and Chengdu (China). Professor Becker studies how the human brain constructs emotions – fear, anxiety, disgust, addiction and even love, and how these emotions can be regulated.

“Emotion puts you in contact with your environment by identifying something very salient, very important. Emotion is the most basic unit of human consciousness,” he says.

But how do you capture a human emotion?

To do so, Professor Becker uses MRI, a technology that measures changes in blood flow to detect activity of brain cells (neurons) and creates high-resolution images of the human brain. He then applies specially designed AI-inspired advanced machine learning tools to analyse the images of the brain activity that takes place in the human brain as we experience different emotions.

One of the most important scientific breakthroughs Professor Becker has made is to read out highly subjective experiences from the brain, for example the feelings of fear, anxiety and disgust. “We don’t know for sure how someone else feels. What do they mean by: “I feel disgusted?” Do they feel the same experience as you? The feeling of disgust is highly subjective and these negative feelings become overwhelming in mental disorders.”

Professor Becker’s research team discovered that although disgust is a very subjective experience, it has a precise signature in the brain that is the same across persons experiencing disgust. We can read this signature, like a brain fingerprint, and say with precision what emotion that person is feeling right now, rather than relying on their own interpretation of their emotion.

“We precisely determined the neurobiological basis of subjective feelings and bridged the mind and brain,” says Professor Becker. “That was a real breakthrough.”

His research team also discovered the evolutionary origin of emotional disgust.

It turns out that feeling disgusted with someone’s behaviour uses the same brain pathway that is activated when the person is tasting something disgusting. The feeling of disgusting taste is an evolutionary adaptation that keeps humans alive by preventing them from eating poisonous substances.

“The same brain mechanism is recruited when you feel being unfairly treated and when you are tasting something disgusting,” says Professor Becker.

How does he generate such innovative ideas?

“Often the ideas come when I am doing something completely unrelated to research – running, swimming, or spending time with my three-year old.”

One ground-breaking idea came when he was running.

“One question haunted me for a long time – the difference between fear and anxiety. Are they the same thing or not? This has been debated in psychology over the past 50 or 60 years.”

The problem was that, explains Professor Becker, according to the traditional thinking, a specific region of the brain is responsible for a certain emotion. For example, a region called the amygdala is responsible for fear. But this traditional approach did not provide enough resolution to tease apart fear and anxiety. In both cases, elevated brain activity – neurons firing in the amygdala is detected – and the MRI image appears the same.

One day Professor Becker realised that rather than focusing on specific regions as has always been done, we must look at the entire brain instead.

“I was running when I had the idea that an emotion is a kind of code distributed over the entire brain, where each neuron activates, or “votes”. This “vote” is not just 0% or 100%, active or inactive, but anything in between. It is like a big discussion between a lot of people, and the final outcome, the final pattern of the “vote”, determines the emotion.”

While running he also realised what experiments could be done and what technology – machine learning, could to be applied to distinguish between the imaging of the brain activity during fear and during anxiety.

He took these ideas to be refined during the regular brainstorming sessions with his research group. These meetings are a key part of the innovation process: “They are a mixture of brainstorming and discussing data. We have them regularly over the week. We discuss what ideas we can develop based on our current data and how to build on it. We also ask: what interesting questions are out there?”

Four years, and a lot of brainstorming, after that run, in February 2024 the results were published in the top journal Nature Communications. It turned out that the brain pathways responsible for fear and anxiety were not the same. Fear and anxiety were two different things. A decades-old question was answered.

How often do such ground breaking ideas come along? Not very often, says Professor Becker.

“It is very difficult to decide what is a good idea and what is not, especially when studying the brain, because the brain is still a terra incognita. With 49 out of 50 ideas, after one hour you realise: Oh, what nonsense! Then, out of the ones left, perhaps 80% are sorted out and discarded over the next week or so.”

But, he adds, in the study of the human brain, the most complex object in the universe, there is an infinity of questions waiting to be answered: “We have more than a century’s-worth of theories and hypotheses from scientists and philosophers about the brain and the mind. I try to play around with this: how can this emotion be explained by biology? How could it have developed in the brain during the process of our evolution? How does the brain construct this emotion?”

Professor Becker’s research has shown how the brain constructs emotions that are part of mental disorders such as depression, addiction, phobias and anxiety attacks.

Knowing the underlying processes of the brain that are involved in these emotions can revolutionise treatment, says Professor Becker, “The ultimate, overarching aim now is to help develop better drugs and technology to treat mental disorders.”

“Equations have beauty. If you understand equations, you understand the rules of the game, the rules of the system. You are the boss, setting order, being in full control,” says Professor Zhiqin Chu.

At HKU, Professor Chu leads his own laboratory and research group, the Precision Biosensing and Biophysics Lab, at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering. His professorship appointment is a joint one with the School of Biomedical Sciences under the Faculty of Medicine, and it is hard to pin down the branch of science that his group belongs to. Their research spans physics, engineering, medicine, chemistry and biology.

Professor Chu was trained as a physicist, and his interest in the subject started in middle school:

“I was about 12, we were studying Newton’s Laws which made a huge impression on me. They are the language, the principle, the mechanism that can describe and summarise everything you see in our daily life – the movements of a person, of a car, of the Moon! I thought this was very cool and wanted to know more.”

He also realised that he had an affinity for physics and mathematics:

“At school, I could sit down, look at an equation, start thinking, let the formulas flow in my mind, and then write down the final answer without doing any calculations on paper. For my bachelor’s, I chose physics and then did a PhD in the same field.”

Professor Chu is quick to add a disclaimer, insisting that he is no genius, but a methodical, slow learner: “I am a kind of person that takes his time doing everything. I don’t seem to learn new things quickly. I learn one thing slowly, fully focused, and then gradually move to the next step.”

Despite his appreciation for the beauty and power of equations, he moved away from pure physics because, he says, they do not reflect the complexity of the real world:

“By describing the world in formulas, physicists focus on ideal scenarios. Then, when you do the practical applications, you discover – oh, this equation is not enough, there is something that cannot be fully described and understood by it. If you hope for your research to change people’s lives, you need to marry theory with reality. You must consider practicality, otherwise there will not be a happy marriage.”

The research fields that Professor Chu is involved in – quantum biosensing, biophysics, nanophotonics – are hard for a non-specialist to understand. But one key word is familiar to everyone: diamonds. His goal is to make diamonds into routine scientific and industrial materials.

“Diamonds are amongst the best candidates on Earth [for future applications],” he explains. “Diamonds can be used for many purposes because they hold a lot of the best physical mechanical and chemical properties.”

He notes that one major potential application is in electronics and semi-conductors. “The commonly used copper is around 300 thermal-conductivity units, but for diamonds it is seven times higher!”

There is however, a problem. The properties of toughness and inertness that make diamonds so desirable as industrial materials also make it extremely difficult to shape them into forms that we can then use. Diamonds are not yet fully “engineerable”, explains Professor Chu:

“If you consider making diamond semi-conductors, we would need diamond plate, diamond film, diamond membrane – workable diamonds. With silicon that is used [for these purposes] in modern electronics – if you want a thinner film of silicon, you can polish it down, but with diamonds this will not work.”

The only way to create workable diamonds, he says, is to make a complete departure from conventional thinking:

“We need to give up the standard procedures. For example, how do I make a film out of diamonds? Forget about polishing and thinning, this does not work, and imagine instead growing a very thin layer of diamonds, and then collecting these layers.”

His team is already having success here: “Scalable growing of synthetic diamonds is nothing new. But the difficulty is in making them usable in modern industry. We have done that recently, and fabricated, on a large scale, a thin diamond membrane.”

Professor Chu is an innovator. His research that spans mechanobiology, quantum technology, nanotechnology, material sciences, and more, has been published in the top journals. His inventions, such as the diamond-based counterfeiting labels, have been patented.

How does one become a researcher who does not merely repeat and add to the work that had been done by others, but instead creates something completely new?

“You must first break the boundary of standard thinking, jump out of its zone – this is what innovation is,” explains Professor Chu. “For example: diamonds. According to the standard thinking they are jewellery, a luxury item. But, and many people will not think that, diamonds can also be used in electronics, in a lot of different applications.”

Then, an aspiring innovator must get over the fear of failure.

“You need to accumulate a lot of failure,” he laughs. “ You try a lot of different approaches, methods, plans, and they can all fail!”

Sometimes failure is not really a failure, if you can think outside the box.

Professor Chu uses the example of counterfeiting labels that his group created. The labels contain nano-diamonds that interact with light in a unique way. The original goal was to grow continuous diamond film on a silicon plate, with the pre-patterned nano-diamonds as initial seeds. But the result was nothing like what was expected. The diamonds grew randomly – a failure.

“My collaborator told me the sample was not successful, there were random patches of diamonds. He wanted to throw the plates out,” he recalls. “I agreed, but after a few hours, I gave him a call, asked him to keep them. I had a feeling we could use them for some other purpose, and that’s how the story started.”

Professor Chu realised that the randomness of the diamond arrangement on the plate was a ready-made one-of-a-kind signature that provided a unique identity to an item marked with such a label. There was no need to force diamonds to grow into a specific pattern. The labels have since been patented and are now awaiting commercialisation.

To be an innovator, you must also provide, by non-stop learning, the “fuel” for your innovations, adds Professor Chu: “I read literature, talk to experts to exchange ideas, I am hands on with all our experiments, I talk to students. These fresh resources are very important.”

Another issue, a common one with young scientists, is not knowing what research direction is the right one. This causes a lot of anxiety and stress.

“This is a very difficult part,” agrees Professor Chu. “If you have identified a direction, this means you are playing a gambling game with your resources, because you don’t know in the beginning if it is going to work.”

But this form of gambling is a good and necessary one. “I gamble too!” he laughs. “If it does not work, and in many cases it will not work, it’s ok!”

He explains that in science, “gambling” and failure must be embraced rather than feared. Failure he says, is a fork on a tree branch, a junction on a researcher’s lifelong road:

“You set a goal, but, even though you did not deliver that original goal, you got something else. Maybe something even better!”

Professor Jane Dai Lixin, associate professor at the Department of Physics at HKU, is a theoretical and computational astrophysicist.

Her speciality is high energy astrophysics, and in particular, the study of the “explosive, transient universe”, for example black holes tearing apart stars.

Professor Dai comes from the small city of Benxi in Northeast China. She earned her BSc from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, did a PhD at Stanford University, followed by postdoctoral research in the USA and Chile, and then held a professorship in Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute which researches the early history of the Universe.

“I started to become interested in the Universe when I was a kid, partly because of reading Greek mythology books. Then I got a physics degree in college, but part of me always wanted to try astronomy. On a human level, we're all interested in the Universe and celestial objects like stars and black holes,” says Professor Dai. “Then, as a PhD student at Stanford, there was a chance to do rotations with different groups. I tried astronomy and then decided to stick to it.”

During middle school, however, she initially found physics hard:

“I have always been good at mathematics, but at first, physics didn't make a lot of sense to me. It was one of the most challenging subjects at that time. I tried to train myself to solve hard physics problems, and the training itself made physics appear more and more interesting.”

The training paid off. She later won the first prize in China’s National Physics Olympiad, a remarkable achievement.

“Back then, we never had in my small city someone who got a first prize in the Physics Olympiad,” Professor Dai recalls. “So everyone thought that me preparing for the Olympiad instead of focusing on the national university entrance exam was a waste of time. Elite schools in big cities have professional coaches to prepare students for the Olympiad, but my school didn’t have such resources. Only my high school physics teacher tried to help me, using his free time. I still appreciate that a lot. The whole experience turned out to be valuable for me for my career later.”

She also had to overcome the “conventional mindset” of the small town. “The message I received back then was that girls are not supposed to be good at math or science. Then as a female student, one can easily get an imposter syndrome – I was never sure whether I was good or not in science. I got a top 5% grade and still thought – I am probably still not good enough! So I kept on trying even harder,” says Professor Dai.

Now she works at the cutting edge of astrophysics. Besides conducting theoretical work, Professor Dai also joins various observational projects. For example, she is part of a telescope project called the Einstein Probe, which is a collaboration of over 100 scientists from China, Europe and the USA, involving the Chinese National Astronomical Observatories, the European Space Agency and the Max Planck Institute. She co-chairs one of the teams that specialises in super-massive black holes.

The data that the scientists use comes from advanced telescopes that observe events that happened around black holes many millions of light years away from Earth. The team observes these events and provides explanations to what are observed.

Not only does this require the technical knowledge of computer modelling and theoretical physics, but also creativity. Sometimes the modern advanced telescopes provide data that cannot be explained by the established theories of how the Universe works. New explanations and models have to be thought up, proposing new rules and even rewriting the history of the Universe: “The old theories and models, based on equations that were calculated with pen and paper, often don't work anymore. We have to be very creative and think about new models to explain the observations.”

She provides an example:

“There is something called black hole accretion disk theory. An accretion disk of gas is going towards the black hole and orbiting it for a while, like the water swirling towards the drain when you open the faucet. There were a lot of theories about how the disks should behave and what kind of light emissions they should be producing. When we got new observations, we found that a lot of the properties of the disk did not fit the classical theories. Now we are trying to make more complicated models, using simulations and machine learning.”

Creativity also has to be combined with speed, because modern telescopes can detect what is known as transient events which evolve very quickly. This new branch of science is called time domain astrophysics.

“In the old days, people were observing things like the sun and the galaxy, which are there all the time,” says Professor Dai. “Now we can observe things that change on a very quick time scale, sometimes just milliseconds, something that can suddenly disappear or appear in the sky, or change emission magnitude. There are new observations every day and things are happening very fast. We have to be very quick in taking observations and coming up with modelling to explain the observations.”

Professor Dai’s “signature research” is in the field known as tidal disruption events.

She explains that in the centre of galaxies there is a very large black hole with stars orbiting around it because of gravity. Sometimes stars can get too close to the black hole. The black hole then tears apart the star with tidal force and then devours the stellar debris. Using telescopes, we can see a very bright flare emission during this process.

“We don’t know which galaxy a tidal disruption event may come from. So we have telescopes scanning the sky, night by night, trying to catch a firework from some unknown part of the Universe,” says Professor Dai.

Studying such events allows scientists to understand the properties not only of the stars and the black holes, but whole galaxies, she explains. Also, even though we observe the flares now, the events producing them could have happened billions of years ago, and studying them allows us to see into the early history of our Universe.

She focuses on a specific part of the tidal disruption events.

When stars are “fed into the black hole”, the debris carry magnetic fields, and produce a lot of radiation, explains Professor Dai. The black hole also consumes gas, but at one point a black hole can no longer “take the feast”, and is instead storing these materials which are then “dancing around the black hole” or even thrown out of it. This is called extreme accretion.

“I do the simulations of how gas, magnetic fields and radiation interplay in the relativistic environment around the black hole, and produce emissions. It requires very large computer simulations, involving hundreds of CPUs. We can now explain these emissions more accurately than the established classical theories did.”

How does one produce research that redefines our understanding of the workings of the Universe?

Having thought the question over, Professor Dai says that the courage to take the challenge and sheer hard work are the start, but warns that there is no universal formula:

“It is hard to say that there is just one strategy. People usually imagine somebody like Einstein – a genius with the whole universe in his brain. But in the current era, conducting scientific research is less about being a genius and more about having a comprehensive set of skills.”

Collaboration, the pooling of effort and expertise, is also important: “In astrophysics there are large programmes, new telescopes, new observations and new theories, and so everyone has to sit together and make connections.”

When asked about plans for the future, Professor Dai says that she will work on connecting to the observations the models that they have built, but adds that the Universe is also certain to serve up puzzles that will need explaining:

“Telescopes will bring new observations. We don’t know what to expect. Actually - we expect that there will be a lot of things which are unexpected.”

Lyu Dengping has recently defended her PhD thesis in Chemistry and her future is bright. This year, she became the first scholar from a Hong Kong university to be awarded the prestigious Schmidt Science Fellowship.

Granted to outstanding scientists at the start of their careers, the fellowship supports the scientist, for up to two years and at a top institution, to pursue interdisciplinary research that stems from their PhD. The research must have global impact.

One of the reasons Dr Lyu became a scientist is her early fascination with bees.

“My grandfather was a beekeeper,” she explains. “I like bees very much because they have intelligent behaviours: they can communicate, can find their way home, and they build architectural structures: the honeycomb. Bees are the inspiration for my scientific journey, even though they have stung me many times.”

Dr Lyu studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangdong, China, and then did a PhD at HKU where she researched colloidal synthesis and self-assembly – making particles suspended in a liquid come together and organise themselves into super-structures.

These particles, clusters of molecules or atoms, are the “bees”, very small ones. “They are one-hundredth of the diameter of the human hair. You can see them only under the microscope,” says Dr Lyu.

She designed the “bees” with specific information coded in their shapes and symmetries. This information determines how the particles interact and what kind of super-structures they form, which then decides the nature of the material that is created.

But even though her “bees” could self-assemble into larger structures, they were not alive or intelligent:

“The particles I studied for my PhD are dead, static. They don’t have a mind, they cannot move. But the architecture I want to build consists of components that have intelligent behaviour, like bees forming swarms and being able to find their way home. That’s the inspiration for my post-doc study.”

The next step for Dr Lyu is to make intelligent materials that share some of the features of living organisms: communication, collective behaviour and self-adaptation to the environment:

“Bees consume energy to fly and communicate. My “bees” are very small nanoparticles that consume energy from the environment to move in fluids. I can design thousands of these nanoparticles coming together and interacting, like a bee swarm. They can then decide where to go: I want to go here, I want to go there.”

“If they do this, they are intelligent. We can then make use of this swarm intelligence in biomedical applications, cancer treatments. We can inject them into a blood vessel and they can decide where to go – for example, into very narrow blood vessels to deliver the cargo of a drug.”

Dr Lyu’s research is truly innovative. Publications in top journals such as Science Advances and Nature Communications, testify to that. What is her recipe for innovation?

First, she says, only if an aspiring innovator has good support and mentorship, would they to be able to thrive and develop their talent. She thanks both her supervisor and her research group:

“My supervisor Professor Wang Yufeng is very supportive of what I want to do, and I got a lot of help from my lab mate Xu Wei who is also my collaborator. In my first year I was really struggling because I did not have a clear objective of what direction I wanted to dive into. The three of us thought over it together, and had the idea of using metal-organic framework particles as building blocks.”

“Also, if you want to do experiments, you need resources and equipment. HKU is a great platform. Our Chemistry Department is very strong, we have a lot of funding and state-of-the-art characterization equipment,” she adds.

Then she mentions the personal qualities needed to do ground-breaking science:

“Curiosity. Asking questions is very important. You must want to know:
what are the biggest issues and challenges in my research field?”

Having identified these research questions, the innovator must have confidence in their ability to deal with them, even though the complexity may be intimidating, and there may be plenty of naysayers:

“Confidence is very important for the new PhD students, because people around you may say: ‘This is too risky for you take on such an ambitious project.’”

Dr Lyu, however, thrives on such challenges:

“I am a risk taker! I will always remember Professor Vivian Yam talking about doing “iconic research”: making discoveries that you are proud of, that make people recognise your name. I like to take risks and pursue challenging research. It's crucial to stay positive and believe in your potential. Keep trying, learning from failures, and making progress, even in small steps, towards your goals.”

“I am an engineer and a hydrologist” 

Professor Ting Fong May Chui is an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Hong Kong.  
 
Professor Chui’s area of expertise is hydrology, the discipline that studies the movement, distribution and management of water. She works on freshwaters – streams, rivers, wetlands and groundwater. The focus of her research is on the interaction between groundwater and surface water and how this interaction affects our environment. Professor Chui also applies this knowledge to restore the natural functioning of freshwaters.  
 
Freshwater is vital for human life and the planet’s biodiversity. “There is a need to study it because we all need freshwater,” says Professor Chui. 

Her interest in freshwaters started during her undergraduate days. “I did a project about groundwater, and when I did my PhD at Stanford, I looked at groundwater/freshwater interactions.” 
 
What is the importance of studying the link between ground and surface waters? 
 
“The two systems are interconnected,” explains Professor Chui. “If you don’t look at this interconnection, you will miss something. If you want to know how much water we have, for human or ecological reasons, we need to know about nutrients and oxygen, and these rely on the exchange mechanism between ground and surface water.” 
 
Professor Chui applies this knowledge to the engineering solutions that can benefit society. One area is the design of drainage systems. This is especially important in cities like Hong Kong where torrential rains can cause flooding.  
 
She explains that in the natural hydrological cycle, the rainwater is absorbed into the ground that then holds it, preventing floods. The ground also releases rainwater into rivers and streams, acting as a natural filter. But this cycle is now broken in urban, concreted-up areas. 
 
“The rain comes, and we send the rainwater out into the sea as quickly as possible using concrete drains that remain dry during other periods of the time because the concrete does not allow the water to infiltrate the ground. There is no retention of water in the watershed and too much water on the surface – hence, flooding.” 

One solution that she works on is porous pavement that allows the rainwater to be absorbed into the ground in cities. Such pavements are made of “any porous permeable material that can sustain a certain amount of loading.” 

Another solution is bioretention cells – planted up areas that are free of concrete, with water filtering and storage facilities underground.  
 
What Professor Chui brings to such projects is computer modelling of the complex hydrological and ecological processes involved: “I call myself both an engineer and a hydrologist, but I am more mathematical. I mostly work with numbers, my strength is computer modelling, but to build these models I need data.” 
 
This data comes from fieldwork: “Sometimes we are in a river or a wetland, sometimes on a pavement, doing measurements – water quantity, water flow”, or from the specially built models of rivers in her laboratory at HKU. 
 
There are still fewer women than men in the positions of leadership in engineering. “I think it is definitely improving but it is taking time,” thinks Professor Chui. “A push to have more women in academia would be an advantage.”

Professor Huang Mingxin is the creator of a world-beating Super Steel that is super-strong, ductile, extremely tough and low-cost, and weighs much less than conventional steel. These features make it useful in multiple applications but especially in automotive steels because they can help to reduce fuel consumption demand from heavier steels. The benefits inspired him to co-found a start-up company to commercialise ultra-high strength automotive steels, which have already been adopted by major carmakers.

Drawing on his expertise in developing new kinds of steel, Professor Huang also sprang into action in the wake of the pandemic to create the world’s first anti-COVID-19 stainless steel. The material inactivates SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses on contact and can help to stop their spread on doorknobs, lift buttons and the like. His discovery received intense international news coverage and has been licensed for the global market.

As a scientist and engineer, Professor Huang believes curiosity-driven research is equally important to industry-driven research. He has experience in both, having earned his PhD from Delft University of Technology and worked in the steel industry before joining HKU in 2010. He was awarded the Croucher Senior Research Fellowship (2022) and Xplorer Prize (2021) in recognition of his ongoing achievements.

Achievements in Science Research and Nurturing Future Scholars 

“I am good at maths, I am naturally very analytical and hate memorising. When I was at high school, it was clear to me that I would go into science,” says biomedical engineer Professor Wei-Ning Lee, Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. 
 
Professor Lee specializes in novel ultra-sound medical imaging techniques that produce sophisticated images of organs and tissues within the living body.  

The images produced by these advanced techniques, such as ultrafast ultrasound imaging, strain imaging and shear wave imaging, “are closer to reality, and help us understand complicated tissues better.”  
 
This allows medical professionals to spot health hazards, such as misalignment of heart muscle fibres, that traditional imaging techniques cannot not pick up. 
 
Professor Lee’s is especially interested in: “dynamic organs – the beating heart, blood vessels, skeletal muscle; dynamic, excitable tissues that are architecturally intricate, whose microstructure is organised in an unique way.” 
 
Her team uses ultra-sound 3D-imaging to see into these dynamic organs and tissues in order to capture “short-lived physiological phenomena such as mechanical waves – for example the pulse waves that we can feel – and small vibrations that travel in the tissue. The speed of these waves can tell us the elasticity of the tissue.” 
 
Now Professor Lee’s team is “pushing the limits”, employing physics-informed neural networks  (PINN) in ultrasound imaging of blood vessels. PINN is a deep learning model that combines knowledge from physics with data-driven learning to produce better detection and more accurate measurements of blood flow and vessel walls. 
 
Professor Lee’s work is especially important in Hong Kong where the elderly population is very large.  “In an ageing society, muscle strength and health are key to mobility. We can bring ultra-sound technology to help better monitor skeletal muscle health.” 

Despite being on editorial boards of the leading publications in her field, Professor Lee, who calls herself a “low-profile person” says: “I don’t think I have big achievements myself. But, my own PhD students turning into scholars is a big achievement.”  
 
Men still outnumber women in engineering, and Professor Lee says: “Women are as capable as men in science. But socially, women do not have as much exposure to science and engineering as men. We must change the mindset, and be confident that we are equally good, or better!”

“I like Information!” 
 
“I am a maths person! From primary school I have done well in maths, and mathematics are very natural to me,” says Professor Edith Ngai, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, explaining what qualities allowed her to become an expert in wireless sensors, machine learning and the Internet of Things. 
 
Professor Ngai’s expertise is then applied in cutting edge technology – smart cities, autonomous driving and smart health. 
 
She was born and raised in Hong Kong. “I have been fascinated with science from a young age. I like information! As a child, I read thick books, encyclopedias … I gathered information about everything – stars, plants, animals.” 

She was also fascinated by the natural world and natural sciences, but at high school, when it was time to choose science or maths, mathematics won: “One of the reasons was that I don’t enjoy dissecting mice!” 
 
When Professor Ngai was an undergraduate, the Internet age started. “When I was choosing subjects at university, I became fascinated with the Internet – you could find any information there, and also communicate.” 
 
For her postgraduate studies she specialized in computer networking: “I like networking and communities – of computers, not humans!” she jokes. “Some people say, I am better at talking to computers than to people!” 
 
Professor Ngai’s area of expertise is how smart, Internet-enabled devices (the Internet of Things) collect data using sensors, use AI to learn from this data, and then communicate with other devices.  
 
This has allowed Professor Ngai to build autonomous systems – for monitoring air pollution in Sweden and water consumption in Hong Kong, for example – with machines doing everything – from collecting data to applying the results – without “human interference.” 
 
“The work that I am proud of is where I put the results of my research into practice,” she explains.  “I have designed many solutions and algorithms for monitory sensory systems, Internet of Things systems, for increasing energy efficiency in smart buildings, improving the safety in autonomous driving and monitoring the environment for pollution.” 
 
Another area of her expertise is federated learning – where smart devices collect their own data and perform their own training rather than sending the data to the central server for processing and learning. This, she says “reduces risk of privacy breach.” 

Professor Ngai’s work has earned her global recognition and an accolade of awards. In 2021 and 2022, Clarivate Analytics placed Professor Ngai in the world’s top 1% by citations. In 2022, she was awarded the AR/VR Policy Research Award in Asia Pacific. This year, she was selected as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEE) Communication Society Distinguished Lecturer. 

There are still few women in her field: “Sometimes, I suddenly realize in a meeting – I am the only woman in this room! About 20% of people in engineering, I think, are women, and I don’t see many top tier professors who are women.” 
 
Her advice to the young women starting out in science and engineering? “Be yourself.”

Dr Qin Youming, a PhD graduate of the HKU MaRS LAB [Mechatronics and Robotic Systems Lab], is the CEO of Manifold Tech Limited and co-inventor of the MindPalace 3D Instant Reconstruction Device, which can scan an entire building, including pipes and electric wires, using real-time 3D mapping algorithms and advanced robotic technology, and provide real-time feedback quickly, accurately and cheaply. MindPalace is expected to drive huge changes in the real estate and construction sector because it eliminates the need for time-consuming manual measurements. The technology is loaded on to the MindPalace-360 space camera, which can host a variety of 3D modelling apps and has potential for use in other fields such as the entertainment industry and ESG (environmental, social and governance).

Manifold Tech Ltd is one of the startups in the Hong Kong Science Park Incubation Programme, while Dr Qin has published many articles on robotics and drones in top journals such as T-Mech and RA-L. Professor Qin was the winner of the international 2018 DJI ICRA AI Challenge and he is passionate about promoting fast-digitising and 3D smart reconstruction technology in the real estate industry.

What Will the Future Marine World Look Like? 
 
“Fascination with the marine world” is the reason Professor Celia Schunter chose her profession. She moved from her native Germany to Australia for the undergraduate degree “to be close to coral reefs.”  
 
Before taking the post of assistant professor at HKU’s Swire Institute of Marine Science (SWIMS), chasing the mysteries of the marine world took her all around the world. “I have had permanent addresses on all continents apart from Africa and Antarctica. My constant moving has defined me.”  
 
At SWIMS, Professor Schunter’s lab studies ecology – the interaction of organisms with their environment, and evolution – changes in organisms as they adapt to their environment, and the research is done at the level of molecules and genes.  

Professor Schunter understood the potential of molecular techniques and genetics early in her academic career: “I was helping with a genetics project, an internship just after my undergrad years, and someone just put a pipette into my hand! I then realised that genetics is a powerful tool to understand how the world works.” 
 
Perhaps the greatest change the world faces now is climate change. The oceans are heating up quickly. Professor Schunter’s work aims to uncover “how organisms are dealing with these changes and what the future marine world will look like.” 
 
Professor Schunter’s team studies how climate change is affecting the behaviour of marine animals, for example fish. Her PhD students and post-doctoral researchers are looking at which genes that are responsible for various behaviours are activated, and how fish behaviours are manifested and controlled in the brain.  
 
“Behaviour is very important in all ecosystems, and also human society. Now, the behaviour is changing because of climate change,” explains Professor Schunter. 
 
Another focus of her research is transgenerational changes caused by climate change. “When you go to a room with a different temperature, your body adjusts - cells change, and the same happens to fish. We study how their cells change and how this is passed on to the next generation.” 

Professor Schunter says that to succeed in science you must be mentally tough. “Never think that you are not capable of something! You need to have passion for what you do, but there is also rejection - in funding applications, in submitting papers. You must be able to cope with this.” 
 
But the benefit of being a scientist, she says, is that has given her “a very flexible and broad view of the world.” 

Professor Schunter won the NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund award in 2022, but defines her main professional achievement as “having grown as a scientist, teacher and mentor.”  
 
This change, she adds, was very gradual, just like the subject of her study. “Science and evolution are an accumulation of small increments, small steps.”

Professor Kevin K.M. Tsia has developed brain imaging technology that can penetrate the brain more deeply than other leading methods and capture images of individual blood cells in fast motion. In a historic first, Professor Tsia was able to show how red blood cells, the fuel of brain activity, move around in the brains of animals that are awake and can move, while previous research only captured slow flow of red-blood cells in the brains of non-moving, anaesthetized animals. This new tool will help neuroscientists better understand the inner workings of the brain, especially how energy is distributed and regulated in both healthy brains and those affected by disorders such as Alzheimer's.

The discovery emerged from Professor Tsia’s ongoing work on ultra-fast optical imaging for flow cytometry and cell-based assay high-speed in-vivo brain imaging approaches to analyse single cells, which have been widely covered by media and scientific magazines. He holds several US patents on his technologies and has co-founded a startup company to commercialise high-speed microscopy to screen for cancer and monitor treatment. Professor Tsia received his PhD from the University of California Los Angeles and he is currently a Research Fellow of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC).

“As scientists, we are always at the forefront of making changes.”  

Professor Alice Sze Tsai Wong is Associate Vice-President (Research) and Interim Director and Chair Professor at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. 

Professor Wong calls herself “a molecular or cell biologist.” Her area of expertise is cancer metastasis. Her team focuses on ovarian cancer, an especially malignant and lethal cancer that spreads very quickly. 

Professor Wong’s contribution to science has been widely recognised. She was awarded the 2022/23 RGC Senior Research Fellowship, in 2021 her team won a silver medal at the Special Edition 2021 Inventions Geneva Evaluation Days, and in 2019 she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

Professor Wong’s career in molecular biology started at her alma mater, the University of Hong Kong: “During my Bachelor’s at HKU, I did a molecular biology course. I found it exciting to be able to work out mechanisms that we cannot see, and I became fascinated with molecular biology.” 

In her PhD she focused on cancer biology, a field where “you can translate (into practical results) your findings more rapidly, and bring benefits to people.” 
 
“I focus on cancer metastasis, which is what causes most deaths in cancer patients, but the mechanisms of metastasis are complex and not yet fully understood,” Professor Wong says, outlining the research direction of her group at HKU.  
 
One of the areas that Professor Wong’s team is looking into is “cell-to-cell signalling.” During metastasis, cancerous cells not only bind to other cancerous cells, but also to non-cancerous cells in healthy tissues, and the ensuing communication – signalling, between the healthy and cancerous cells then enables the cancer to become aggressive and spread. 
 
Professor Wong’s important discovery is that the process of cell adhesion – cancer cells settling on healthy host tissue, is dynamic rather than static. 
 
“Often, when cancer cells try to settle on host tissue cells, they are in motion, and so there is shear stress. When settling under shear stress, very different molecules are involved in cell-to-cell communication than when they bind in a static condition.” 
 
Knowing what these communicator molecules are allows us to use them as biomarkers, explains Professor Wong. Detection of these biomarkers signals that cancer may be spreading, and can also be used for guiding cancer treatment.  

Professor Wong says that pioneering, inquisitive spirit is essential to succeed in science, because “as scientists, we are always at the forefront of making changes.”  
 
She adds this advice for young scientists: “First of all, be passionate. You must like what you do. If you don’t, you will see challenges negatively rather than seeing them positively and embracing them.” 
 
Professor Wong thinks that now it is a good time to pursue a scientific career in Hong Kong: “There are more funding opportunities, communications are easier, and things progress rapidly. Also, Hong Kong has more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) now, and it is very good for young scientists to take this opportunity to do first class research, translate their work to industry, and bring it into the community.”

Professor Kenneth K. Y. Wong has been leading the development of ultra-deep and ultra-fast optical microscopies and laser technologies to produce images of brain tissues and, ultimately, deepen understanding of fundamental neuroscience and the mechanisms behind psychiatric diseases. One achievement is a compact fiber laser microscope that bypasses fluorescent markers to obtain a clear image of cell molecules and uses a fiber laser as the light source to replace the traditional solid-state laser. Its compactness makes it highly suitable for clinical applications, such as in endoscopic examinations of the intestines and digestive systems to detect tumours and lesions. Professor Wong and his collaborators are also developing an integrated and modularised multiphoton microscopy that could rapidly capture deep and functional animal brain imaging.

Professor Wong’s research interests include novel optical generation, photonic parametric processing and ultra-fast optical fibre communication and imaging (spectroscopy, microscopy and tomography). He has a PhD from Stanford University and was a member of the Photonics and Networking Research Laboratory there. He also has industry experience with organisations such as Hewlett Packard Laboratories and Innovation CORE (A Sumitomo Electric Company).

“I am a logical person!”
 
The expertise of Professor Chuan Wu, of the Department of Computer Science, is in networking and distributed learning. But the computer-scientist / engineer also applies her knowledge in creating smart appliances to improve the lives of the elderly and the people who care for them. 
 
Professor Wu has a number of such projects. The best known is a smart elderly walker, a hands-free device that follows the person’s movements. Even though it is still in development, technologically the walker is cutting-edge, and was awarded a bronze medal at the 48th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva in 2023.  

Professor Wu’s motivation to develop such devises is personal: “My father had Parkinson’s. I was taking care of him for 7 years. I saw a lot of need for manpower in taking care of people who do not move well.” 
 
Her latest effort in this field is “a dialogue system for cognitive stimulation for people with dementia or cognitive impairment.” 

“Social workers, human coaches talk with the elderly to stimulate their brains, and I am doing an automatic version – a smart speaker to chat with an elderly person, to coach and guide them to talk,” explains Professor Wu.  

Her family was influential in her choice of career: “I majored in computer science, because both of my parents were electrical engineers and they thought that the next generation of engineering is computer science.” 
 
She got a place in China’s elite Tsinghua University, but computers were new to the new computer science undergraduate: “I was not even good at typing when I started university! There were not many computers around, you did not see too much technology at that time.” 

As for computer science, Professor Wu soon discovered that she was “good at it.” 
 
“I like computer science algorithms – it is natural for me to understand these types of things. It is logical thinking and I am a logical person!” she says.  
 
After completing her Master’s, she worked in the industry, but left after two years to go into academia: “I was a software engineer. But I like to think deeper – a lot! That’s why I decided to do research.” 

Her research interests followed the developments in information technology.  

In the early 2000s, networking was becoming a very popular field, and it drew her in. Then, around 2010, cloud computing burst on the scene: “I found cloud computing a very interesting, futuristic domain to work on.” 

The next stage was machine learning. “In 2016, as machine learning started to pick up, I realised this could be the future. There was need for networking to transfer data, to drive applications. This is why from then till now my main research has been building systems to support different machine learning.” 
 
One of her interests, that she also researches and teaches, is optimisation theory – a branch of mathematics dedicated to solving problems of optimising performance in various fields and systems.  
 
The idea of improving and optimising appeals to Professor Wu: “I am a perfectionist. I always try to maximise and perfect. This is part of my character.” 

Professor Yi Yang works on nanophotonics and optical physics, where he investigates the interaction of light with materials at the extreme nanoscale, with free electrons, and with synthetic gauge fields. One of his recent achievements, published in Nature, showed how it could be possible to make interactions between photons and free electrons stronger – a finding that could have ramifications down the road for both commercial applications and fundamental scientific research.

Professor Yang is still in the early stages of his career, but already he is attracting attention. He did his PhD and postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before joining HKU in 2022. Since arriving, he has received several prestigious honours: awarded under the 2022 Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macau) of the National Natural Science Foundation of China; named one of the 2022 Innovators Under 35 (China) by the MIT Technology Review, under the category of ‘Inventors’; and selected as one of 12 exceptional early-career scientists from the Asian region to become an inaugural Fellow of the 2023 Asian Young Scientist Fellowship.

Saving Nature Through Technology

Having been born and raised in Hong Kong, where nature and city are intertwined, formed both Virko’s view of the world and her future: “I grew up in the countryside, my childhood in the New Territories - going for hikes with my dad shaped me; I knew that development and nature can co-exist.”

While doing a PhD at HKU’s School of Biological Sciences, looking for answers to the restoration of coral reefs, Vriko Yu and her supervisor Dr David Baker came across a winning solution – planting coral fragments on specially-designed 3D printed terracotta tiles whose texture and structure allow coral to anchor and grow.

Coral reefs account for a quarter of the world’s entire marine biodiversity and support the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people, but global warming is predicted to destroy 90% of the planet’s coral reefs by 2050. Vriko wanted to put her discovery to the service of humanity.

In 2020, she co-founded Archireef, providing services to restore corals and monitor their recovery. The start-up proved a success, enlisting top corporate clients in Hong Kong and making the Forbes Asia 100 To Watch List 2022. Archireef then went global after the investment from the Abu Dhabi government, allowing it to expand production and launch coral restoration projects in the Arabian Gulf. Archireef is now extending its reach into more countries and is in the process of adding restoration of other threatened marine ecosystems, such as mangroves and oyster beds, to their portfolio.

Vriko believes that, in order to save our marine biodiversity and counter climate change, the private sector, and not just academia must be involved. Archireef, she says, provides the link between the two: “The field of biodiversity has been restricted to academics and conservationists. Archireef translates science and biodiversity to the private sector, in a commercially understandable way.”

She admits that going from a PhD student working in a university laboratory to a company CEO speaking at Davos World Economic Forum involved a steep learning curve. But Vriko says that self-belief and adaptability can overcome anything: “Don’t set restrictions and definitions to yourself. Stay flexible. There has been a lot of risk taking on this journey, I knew nothing about business when I started, but I am super stubborn. If I need to do something, I believe I can do it. And then I do it.”