HKU Bulletin June 2013 (Vol. 14 No. 3)

Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award This award goes to supervisors who guide their research students to achieve excellence. Recipients receive $25,000 to further their research, as well as a research postgraduate studentship. Professor Annie Cheung Nga-yin 0 $ 1 * 2 ! 3 $ ! % & 6 * ! - % + % 7 5 Professor Cheung likens research to a large ship sailing on the ocean. “In the early stages of research, the supervisor is responsible for steering the direction of the research,” she said, “while the students need to work hard to keep it moving forward.” Her aim is to help students fulfill their potential, contribute to advances in science and to become citizens the University can be proud of. “I believe as supervisors we need to adjust to both the special abilities and the weaknesses of the students. But it’s not only about work. Harmony and happiness in the working area are also very important.” Professor Cheung has stated that her main motivation in her work is to better women’s health, so she is most interested in the study of cancers of the ovary, uterine corpus and cervix. In recent years, her team has made significant findings in the studies of stem cell transcription factors and carcinogenetic signal pathways to develop potential molecular targets for cancer detection prognostication and therapy. Mr Stephen Lau Siu-yu 0 $ 1 * 2 ! 3 $ ! % & 4 2 ) - " ! $ ) ! # 2 $ Mr Lau has been teaching at HKU for more than 25 years in the fields of architectural and urban design, environmental controls, and sustainability. Since the 1990s he has concentrated his efforts on fostering a critical mass of young researchers in the architectural science discipline. He believes that architecture enables students to view the world around them in two ways – first to see the aesthetics, the visuals and culture, and second to have the scientific vision for how to turn those aesthetics into reality. Mr Lau also believes strongly in going beyond the books, and loves to discuss and debate with his students and to take them outside the classroom to learn in the real world. “I see it as a necessity for my students to go beyond the library and I invite them to challenge their limits by taking part in international competitions. This gives each of them the opportunity to show how architectural design and architectural research can be integrated and best serve society.” ResearchOutput Prize The best pieces of research published or created in each Faculty in the preceding calendar year are honoured with this reward. Recipients receive $120,000 to further their research. Architecture Chinese cities are undergoing great spatial restructuring as the economic emphasis transforms from manufacturing to service industries, and this research – ‘Intraurbation Location of Producer Services in Guangzhou, China’– has advanced the understanding of those changes. Authors Dr Yi Hong, Dr Yang Fan and Professor Anthony Yeh Gar- on discovered the distribution pattern of producer services has changed from dispersed to centripetal development towards the new business district. Arts In his book Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War , Professor Xu Guoqi has created a detailed study of a hitherto little documented part of China’s history, its participation in WWI. China’s major contribution was sending some 140,000 labourers to Europe to free up Allied soldiers for the battlefront. The book is a significant contribution to the literature on WWI, offering a Chinese perspective on the world crisis. Business and Economics ‘Intellectual Capital and Financing Decisions: Evidence from the US Patent Data’ explores a question previously left untackled in capital structure literature. Authors Professor Liu Qiao and Professor Wong Kit-pong provide a tractable theoretical framework in which to study intellectual capital in a standard dynamic model, and identify it as a key determinant of capital structure. Dentistry A substantial team led by Dr Rory Munro Watt contributed to the paper ‘Structural and Functional Insight into the Mechanism of an Alkaline Exonuclease from Laribacter Hongkongensis’ , research which enhances the basic understanding of DNA repair processes in microorganisms involved in oral and systemic diseases. The paper specifically reported the three-dimensional X-ray crystal structure of an exonuclease protein from the bacterium Laribacter Hongkongensis , which was first discovered in Hong Kong. Education Dr Law Wing-wah’s book Citizenship and Citizenship Education in a Global Age: Politics, Policies, and Practices in China sheds new light on the field of globalisation and citizenship. Covering different periods, from two millennia ago to contemporary China, it is one of the first studies to theoretically examine, with empirical data, how the politics, policies and practices of citizenship and citizenship education in China respond to domestic social change and global change. Engineering A critical component in the operation of wireless sensor networks, ‘network clock synchronisation’ is usually studied from the point of view of network protocol. But in their paper ‘Clock Synchronization of Wireless Sensor Networks’, Dr Wu Yik-chung, Dr QasimChaudhari and Professor Erchin Serpedin take an innovative signal processing approach which has led to several significant advances in the area. Law Dr Shahla Ali enters a relatively new area of research in her book Resolving Disputes in the Asia-Pacific Region: International Arbitration and Mediation in East Asia and the West . She examines how different cultures approach conflict within the context of the integration of global markets, presenting empirical research on the attitudes and perceptions of arbitrators, judges and lawyers across China and much of Asia as well as North America and Europe. Medicine A 17-strong team contributed to ‘Long-term Evolution and Transmission Dynamics of Swine Influenza A Virus’, a paper offering key insights into the processes which lead to influenza pandemics in humans. Genetic analyses of influenza viruses in swine in China over the past 15 years and of previous studies in the region going back 34 years, revealed how hybrid viruses with gene segments acquired from multiple virus lineages emerged. The research unravelled the steps leading to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. Science The Dirichlet distribution has a wide variety of uses in statistical literature and applications, yet Professor Ng Kai-wang, Patrick SC Poon Professor in Statistics and Actuarial Science, Dr Tian Guoliang and Dr Tang Man-lai recognised a need to extend the Dirichlet family of distributions in different directions in order to enrich the application methodologies. In their book, Dirichlet and Related Distributions: Theory, Methods and Applications , they systematically present the flexible parametric classes of distributions they developed, including the Grouped Dirichlet Distribution and the Nested Dirichlet Distribution. Social Sciences In their paper, ‘The Causality Analysis of Climate Change and Large-scale Human Crisis’, a team of seven from Social Sciences revealed the results of research indicating climate change as a root cause of general crises in pre-industrial societies. The team analysed a large amount of fine- grained, agro-economical, socio-economic and demographical data and climate functions in Europe from AD1500 to AD1800. This is the first scholarly work to verify scientifically a causal link between climate change and human crisis. Dr Huang Jiandong 0 $ 1 * 2 ! 3 $ ! % & ? " % ) - $ 3 " ! 2 5 Dr Huang likes to explore new territory. He has applied engineering technologies to genomic studies and the development of more efficient methods in DNA and chromosome engineering and pursued synthetic biology as a means of uncovering fundamental principles of life and for cancer treatment. He approaches his work with an excitement for what he can accomplish and tries to instill that in his students. “Scientists are trying to discover something useful for society, and they are also purely interested in going somewhere nobody has been before,” he said. Dr Huang said being a supervisor means supporting students while they travelled down their own paths of discovery. “I try to see what their needs are and to be like a car that takes them to their destination. I try my best to get them where they want to go,” he said. Students praise his efforts to offer feedback, take them on conferences, involve them in international competitions and meet other scientists. June 2013 37 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin Teaching, Research and Knowledge Exchange Awards