The Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) has been pushing the boundaries of knowledge through interdisciplinary collaboration, celebrating the scientific achievements of its global community of scholars.

Professor Evelyn Hu, HKIAS Senior Fellow, was honoured with the 2021 IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal. The award recognizes the leadership of Professor Hu in nanoscale science and engineering, and her seminal contributions at the intersection of semiconductor electronics and photonics.

Dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary research and innovative solutions for addressing real-world problems, the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has evolved over the past five years into a renowned center of scientific advancement in Hong Kong and globally.

The Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) General Meeting was held at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) on 18 November 2020. The meeting was hosted both face-to-face and online through Zoom.

Professor Qi-Kun Xue, HKIAS Senior Fellow, has been appointed as the President of the Southern University of Science and Technology, China, effective from November 2020.

When COVID-19 began to spread across the world in January 2020, academics from the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) were quick to act.

Two recent talks presented by senior fellows of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study highlight a platform for sharing results of high-impact research.

A finding by Professor Ke Lu, HKIAS Senior Fellow and the research team from The Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences was featured on Science. Metals with nanometer-sized crystal grains are super strong, but they do not generally retain their structure at higher temperatures. This property undermines their high strength and makes their use in applications challenging. Professor Lu and the research team found a minimum-interface structure in copper with 10-nanometer-sized grains that, when combined with a nanograin crystallographic twinning network, retains high strength to temperatures just below the melting point. This discovery suggests a different path forward for stabilizing nanograined metals.

Professor Herbert Gleiter, HKIAS Senior Fellow, was conferred the Honorary Doctoral Degree and appointed as a Senior Fellow from the University of Lanzhou in China. The award ceremony will be held during The Gleiter Symposium on Frontier of Nanoscience on 23 November 2020. Professor Gleiter will deliver a plenary lecture titled “New Concepts in Nanoscience - New Kinds of Materials opening the Way to New Technologies” at the conference. In view of the pandemic, the conference and the ceremony will be conducted online.

A world-renowned mathematician, Professor Philippe G. Ciarlet, University Distinguished Professor of the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), delivered an online lecture titled “Nonlinear Korn Inequalities on a Surface” for the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) at CityU on 5 November 2020.