The Review 2005

2 1 T HE R E V I EW 2 0 0 5 seeking to exploit their expertise to develop partnerships that produce new methods and areas of enquiry. The benefits to knowledge are promising; so are the benefits to universities. Collaboration, and its partner, internationalisation, keeps us fresh and competitive. By seeking outside input, we are able to benchmark ourselves against the world’s best and maintain and raise our standards. We can also achieve greater efficiencies of scale and broaden the impact of our work when our partners come from outside our institution. Marching with the times, The University of Hong Kong will continue to pursue partnerships that help us to produce superior research and meet the rapidly changing demands of today’s world. Significantly, a very substantial $471 million was granted by the Innovation and Technology Commission in 2005 to a research project that involved business and academic partners. The project is an R&D centre to support and develop Hong Kong’s logistics sector, one of the city’s four economic pillars. Non-academic partners include the Hong Kong Article Numbering Association, Hong Kong Productivity Council and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. The centre is to be jointly operated by our Faculty of Engineering and E-Business Technology Institute with colleagues from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The flurry of activity on cross-discipline and cross-boundary research does not detract from the more traditional form of partnership between scholars keen to advance knowledge in their chosen discipline. Many exciting findings continue to result from discipline-specific research. For example, our Department of Microbiology is world-renowned for its work on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the virus that causesbirdflu,while theDepartment of Linguisticshas attracted international interest for its findings on language learning and brain activity. The excellent quality of their research led the central government to approve the establishment of State Key Laboratories in each research area, one in 2004 and the other in 2005. These facilities will provide high-level research and development, and are the only State Key Laboratories outside Mainland China. Quality, discipline-based research could be regarded as an essential building block in the successful integration of different scholarly fields. Leading universities everywhere are Dr Xue Hong is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law and was elected one of the “Ten Outstanding Young Jurists in China” in 2004 by the China Law Society. “Collaboration is extremely important for legal academics because the law in different jurisdictions has become more or less unified through international trade and international exchange. Collaborative research can improve the understanding of scholars in different jurisdictions.” The Departments of Ecology and Biodiversity and Earth Sciences, are working with the American space agency, NASA, to investigate micro- organisms in extreme environments in Asia.