Research Opportunities

The headline development of the year was the legislative approval of the government’s InnoHK scheme, which provides up to $500 million to each research project in the fields of medicine and engineering. This is well beyond any previous funding provision by the government. HKU submitted very strong proposals and we are confident that several of these will be approved. At the same time, we continued to perform strongly in other government-funded schemes, including the General Research Fund which granted us $163 million for 217 projects in 2019, the most of any Hong Kong institution. We were also the first to benefit from new rules that allow Hong Kong scholars to apply directly to the National Key R&D Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology for funds that will be used for research conducted in Hong Kong, when Professor William Lu Weijia from the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine received a RMB27.44 million grant.

While these results are very satisfying, the University can and must do even better to ensure we carry our momentum forward and capitalise on the new opportunities before us. Recruiting the best scholars from around the world remains a top priority and we added fuel to that effort in 2018–19 with the launch of the Presidential PhD Scholarships and Post-doctoral Fellowships, which will provide substantial funds to support young scholars and their research in addition to that provided by the Hong Kong government. We plan to recruit up to 100 scholars in each category over three years. We also invited young scholars to visit Hong Kong in October, for the Meeting of Minds@HKU Forum, to present their research and check us out. And we will soon launch a very ambitious programme to recruit 50 leading senior scholars from around the world – the cream of the crop. Enriching our talent pool will ensure we have solid foundations for future success.