Professor Bruce R. Ransom, a recognized scholar in neurology, presented a lecture titled “Acute Ischemic Stroke: Why Don’t We Have Better Treatments?” at the inaugural lecture of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) Distinguished Lecture Series on Life Sciences at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) on 4 May 2020. This lecture is sponsored by a generous donation from the Kwang Hua Educational Foundation.

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.

Dr. Tao Yang, a former HKIAS Postdoctoral Fellow, currently an Assistant Professor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at City University of Hong Kong (CityU), was interviewed by a leading international scientific journal, nature.

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.

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 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.

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.