Annual Symposium on Transdisciplinary Research

Dr Chen Ting’s research specialises in political economy, economic history and development economics. Her specific focus is on empirical research, namely to analyse real-world data to understand economic agents and explore the economic, social and political factors that determine long-term development. Dr Chen was hired under HKBU’s Talent100 Scheme. Since joining the University in July 2018, she has published papers in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Econometrics and Economic Journal. Before joining HKBU, as a PhD student she published a paper in the Journal of Development Economics, while her economic history research project “Telegraph, Railway Networks, and the Adoption of Agricultural Technology” won funding from the Research Grants Council along with an Early Career Scheme grant. Read More.

William K. Cheung is the Associate Vice-President (Undergraduate Programmes) and
Professor, Department of Computer Science a Professor in the Computer Science Department, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is also the Director of Centre for Health Informatics, HKBU and an affiliated member of McGill School of Information Studies. His research interests include data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning with applications to health informatics, social network analysis, text mining, and collaborative filtering. He has published more than 150 technical papers in journals and conferences including TPAMI, TKDE, TCYB, TIST, IJCAI, AAAI, ICDM, ICML, WI/IAT, ICHI, and PAKDD. He has served as the co-chairs of a number of international conferences and workshops, as well as guest editors of journals on areas including artificial intelligence, Web intelligence, data mining, Web services, e-commerce technologies, and health informatics. He was the Managing Editor IEEE Intelligent Informatics Bulletin from 2007 to 2018. Read More.

Meng Gao is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Hong Kong Baptist University. Before joining HKBU, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University (2016-2019). He received Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Iowa in 2015, and B.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (formerly named Nanjing Institute of Meteorology) in 2012. His research interests include air quality modeling/forecasting, chemistry-climate interactions, environmental health, and artificial intelligence in atmospheric sciences. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier journals including Science Advances. He was awarded the Atmospheric Science Division Outstanding Young Scientist by EGU in 2020, and was invited to attend ACCESS XIV (14th Atmospheric Chemistry Colloquium for Emerging Senior Scientists) in 2017.  Read More.

Dr. Liu graduated with B.Med. and M.Med. degree in Sun Yat-sen University in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and then received his Ph.D. degree from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2016. He then finished his postdoctoral training and served as a Research Assistant Professor in Law Sau Fai Institute for Advancing Translational Medicine in Bone & Joint Diseases (TMBJ), HKBU. He became a tenure-track Assistant Professor in School of Chinese Medicine at HKBU in 2021. Dr. Liu’s research is focusing on the translational medicine in musculoskeletal diseases, with particular interest in the extracellular vesicle-mediated intercellular communication and regulation in musculoskeletal development and diseases, and aptamer-based bone-targeting drug delivery as a therapeutic approach. His work has been published in internationally renowned journals, including Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Nature Aging, Biomaterials, Advanced Science, Aging Cell, EBioMedicine etc. Read More.

Dr Peter AC Nelson is an art historian, game scholar and visual artist working at the intersection of computer game and landscape studies. He is engaged in a prolonged consideration of the history of landscape images, how they are remediated by technological shifts, and how these shifts absorb and reflect changes in our relationships with the physical environment. He has exhibited his artworks widely, including projects with HanArt TZ Gallery (Hong Kong), The National Palace Museum (Taiwan), The Sichuan Fine Art Academy Museum (Chongqing), the K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong) and HowArt Museum (Shanghai) and is a regular contributor to the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, DiGRA and Chinese DiGRA, of which he is a current board member. Peter is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts and the Augmented Creativity Lab at Hong Kong Baptist University where he is working on research projects that span player-generated content, landscape encoding using Generative Adversarial Networks and the ontology of the digital image. Read More.

Dr Song, an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism, is also the Director of the School of Communication’s Artificial Intelligence and Media Research Lab. A former journalist, Dr Song now finds herself collaborating regularly with computer scientists and social network analysts on cutting-edge interdisciplinary projects. She is a visiting Fulbright scholar at Cornell University from 2019-2020. She is the editor of Communication & Society and the associate editor of Quality and Quantity, and Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia. She serves as the Award Chair of Chinese Communication Association and the Mass Communication and Society Division of AEJMC. Dr Song’s numerous honours include being a two-time recipient of the prestigious Fulbright award. Her research projects have been awarded a series of internal and external grants, including from the General Research Fund, Quality Education Fund, Public Policy Research Fund, as well as an external grant from the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, Canada, and CONVERGE COVID-19 Working Group Award, USA. Read More.

Professor Ken K.L. YUNG received his DPhil from the University of Oxford, UK in Neuroscience. He then joined the Hong Kong Baptist University and started his lab. His current research mainly focusses on the causes and treatments of neurodegenerative diseases. His lab has developed a nanomaterial-based technology for harvesting autologous neural stem cells from the brain of living subjects. This unique patented technology forms an important basis for personalized neural stem cell replacement therapy for patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Currently, his research team has also pioneered in a nanomaterial-based cell differentiation device that can minimize the risk of tumorigenesis for stem cell therapy. These technologies have won several international innovation awards. Professor Yung has published so far over 120 SCI journal papers and has 3800 citations with H-index of 34. Professor Yung serves as the Executive Associate Dean of Graduate School and he was the Associate Head of Department of Biology and sat on the Advisory Board of School of Chinese Medicine in Hong Kong Baptist University. He is also the current Vice Chairman of Hong Kong Biotechnology Organization, Vice President of the Hong Kong Society of Neurosciences and Council member of the Hong Kong Brain Foundation. Read More.

Professor Zhongying Zhao obtained his BSc and MSc at the Department of Biology from Anhui Normal University and Beijing Normal University in Anhui and Beijing China, respectively. He earned his PhD from the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada. Prior to joining the University in 2010, he did his postdoc in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA for 5 years. His research activities are mainly funded by Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC). As a PI, he has secured seven RGC grants to support his research, including five General Research Funds (GRFs), one NSFC/RGC Joint Research Scheme fund and one Early Career Scheme (ECS) project since 2011. He has established wide collaborations both locally, regionally and internationally, which helped him win RGC Collaborative Research Fund as a Principle coordinator (PC). His research mainly focuses on three topics, which are summarized below. Read More.