HKU Bulletin May 2009 (Vol. 10 No. 2)

22 23 Outstanding Young Researcher Award The Outstanding Young Researcher Award is bestowed on academics under the age of 40 who have shown great promise in their research accomplishments. Winners receive a monetary award of $150,000 per year for two years to further their research. He brings both academic and business experiences to his research. In between obtaining a PhD from Stanford University and joining the University of Hong Kong, where he is now Associate Professor, he spent a couple of years working as an engineer in Silicon Valley. This experience led him to undertake research on a highly successful hi-tech enterprise in semiconductor equipment manufacturing, as part of a book he co-authored. He emerged with a deeper knowledge of the technology and also better insights into leadership and management and an appreciation of the value of high technology in Hong Kong. Dr Siok Wai Ting School of Humanities Dr Siok and her collaborators identified a region of the human brain that plays a pivotal role in Chinese reading and also showed how reading disabilities can result in children learning to read Chinese when there are abnormalities in this area. Her work has been published in Nature and other prestigious journals and has attracted widespread academic recognition and mass media coverage. Dr Siok is a specialist in neurolinguistics, reading and language disorders, and bilingualism, and uses magnetic resonance imaging to uncover the brain mechanisms involved in reading and language processing. She hopes to extend her work further to develop intervention strategies in developmental dyslexia. She holds a PhD from HKU and completed two years of postdoctoral training at Stanford University. In addition to being Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, she is also a principal investigator of the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Dr Patrick Henry Toy Department of Chemistry Dr Toy is working on developing new methodologies and technologies to improve and simplify the processes of organic synthesis. Since he joined the University in 2001 he has investigated such things as industrial wastewater treatment and new organic chemical reactions. Dr Toy’s work has been published in a number of prestigious scientific journals and, according to the ISI Essential Science Indicators , he has been among the top 1% of scientists publishing in chemistry-related journals over the past decade. His work has also been cited by the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable. Dr Toy received his PhD from Wayne State University, in the United States, in 1998 and worked at Scripps Research Institute and Wyeth before joining HKU. He is currently Associate Professor of Chemistry. Dr Chris Chan Tsun Leung Department of Pathology Dr Chan has won numerous awards in his research career. In 1997 and 1998 he was granted the Young Investigator Award for two consecutive years from the Hong Kong International Cancer Congress. He also won the prestigious Scholar-in-Training Award in 2001 and the AACR- ITO EN Scholar-in-Training Award in 2004 from the American Association for Cancer Research. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and one of the key members of the 2007 Research Output Prize from the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. Dr Chan’s investigations are committed to the genetic diagnosis of hereditary colorectal cancer (CRC). He has identified founder mutations (recurrent mutations descending from a unique origin) which constitute one of the key factors accounting for the high incidence of early-onset CRC in the local population. The most influential founder mutation has been identified in 30 unrelated families and is presumed to have arisen from the delta region more than 100 generations ago. Dr Annie Cheung Shann Yue Department of Law Dr Cheung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law where she has twice been awarded the Faculty’s Research Output Prize (in 2006 and 2007). Her work includes studies on the prevention of domestic violence, the changing concept of privacy, and freedom on the Internet. One of her current projects is on the increasing reliance on the Internet as a ‘human flesh search engine.’ In 2004, she was awarded a Universitas 21 fellowship to study the mobilization of public opinion despite apparent tight censorship in Mainland China. Because of her work on Internet free speech and governance she was invited to join the Open Net Initiative in 2008, an international project hosted by Harvard University, University of Cambridge and the University of Toronto. Dr Edmund Lam Yin Mun Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Dr Lam was intrigued by semiconductors from a very young age and he has focused that interest on imaging – specifically, using computation to enhance the quality of images for analysis and reduce the data acquisition in developing more powerful and cost-effective imaging modalities. He is investigating how these can be applied in semiconductor manufacturing and biomedical systems. Dr Chris Chan Tsun Leung Dr Annie Cheung Shann Yue Dr Edmund Lam Yin Mun Dr Siok Wai Ting Dr Patrick Henry Toy TEACHING AND RESEARCH