HKU Bulletin February 2004 (Vol. 5 No. 2)

23 22 RESEARCH AND TEACHING Outstanding Researcher Award Professor Ng Tung Sang Professor: Chair of Electronic Engineering and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering P rofessor Ng is an expert in mobi le communicat ion technologies, especial ly in CDMA which uses spread spectrum techniques. In recognition of his contributions to signal design and processing in spread spect rum communications systems in a series of papers in IEEE Transactions, he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE. He is current ly an edi tor of IEEE Transact ions on Mobi le Computing . Professor Ng is very active in international professional engineering activities. He was the Vice President of Region 10 (Asia including India and China), IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for two terms; a member of the IEE President’s Strategic Working Party on future governance and developments; and the General Chair of the 1997 IEEE symposium on Circuits and Systems in Hong Kong with over 1000 participants. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Australia’s Universi ty of Newcast le in 1997 in recogni t ion of his contributions to engineering education. He was also awarded the Senior Croucher Foundation Fellowship in 1999, and the IEEE Millennium Medal in 2000. tsng@eee.hku.hk http://www.eee.hk u.hk/staff/tsng.htm Professor Yang Dan Reader, Department of Chemistry P rofessor Yang is particularly interested in the development of eff icient and envi ronmental ly-f r iendly methods for drug synthesis. Besides contributing to basic research in synthetic organic chemistry, she and her fellow-researchers at HKU have developed a catalyst in the synthesis of a key intermediate for Diltizem, a billion-dollar drug for the treatment of high blood pressure and chest pain. This has been successfully applied by a Japanese pharmaceutical company. She is currently applying the tools of organic chemistry to tackle challenging problems in cell biology, proteomics, and genomics. Professor Yang has won two international awards: the Mr and Mrs Sun Chan Memorial Award in Organic Chemistry (in 2000), and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation’s Unrestricted Grants in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (in 2001). She also received an Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 1999, a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship in 2001, and the National Outstanding Young Scholar Award in 2003. She has given invited lectures at prestigious universities around the world, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, UC- Berkeley, Chicago, UCLA, and Tokyo. yangdan@hku.hk http://chem.hku.h k/~chemhome/staff/dyang/dyang.htm