News & Stories

A team led by scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) R&D Laboratory (IAS HKUST-Scripps R&D Laboratory) and aTyr Pharma has found that ancient enzymes, known for their fundamental role in translating genetic information into proteins, evolved myriad other functions in humans. The surprising discovery of 250 new proteins with previously unidentified activities spanning from stem cell biology to immunology highlights an intriguing oddity of protein evolution as well as a potentially valuable new class of therapeutic proteins. These findings appear in the July 18, 2014 issue of Science.

Xinyue Wang Year 3, major in Accounting and Finance I'm Wang Xinyue, from Beijing. I'm currently a 3rd year student and graduating this June majoring in accounting and finance. I came to Hong Kong with no idea as to what my host city would be like. I entered HKUST with no clue what this university would mean to me. And I began my major with no plans about post-graduation life.But now I am about to graduate, determined and hopeful about my career and with a splendid blueprint for life. It is HKUST that has seeded my dreams. For the University is like an ocean, there is always space for you to explore and shine. “To thrive or survive? It’s your choice. Find out what you are truly interested in and you can become what you believe,” one of my professors said during my very first year at HKUST. Brought up on spoon-fed teaching, I was initially thrown by this question. Where did my interests really lie? For the first time, I started to explore.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has invented a mini pulsed electric field device which could reduce more than 90 percent of bacteria in the running tap water in a few seconds. The technology is a possible way to help control the spread of water-borne diseases such as Legionellosis caused by microbial contamination of water.

In the fascinating, unfolding world of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), a whole new set of relationships between learners is being forged, according to Prof King L Chow, Professor in the Division of Life Science at HKUST, one of the institutions pioneering the way in Asia for these global courses. “In the past, university students would only discuss with classmates when doing group projects. Now in my course, I have seen high school students, a graduate student, an archeologist, chefs and homemakers discussing recipes together.”

Claire Chan Final Year Student, Dual Degree Program in Technology Management Founder of Sensbeat During my four years at HKUST, I have been provided with opportunities that I would never have even thought about at high school. In studying at HKUST, I have had the chance to travel the world for different conferences and competitions on topics ranging from technology to human liberation. I have met and talked to world leaders, studied in another top global university, founded “HKUST Great Minds” to spread the power of ideas, and participated in voluntary work on the other side of the world. Crucially,HKUST also helped me to meet a group of talented people with similar interests, which is how we came to create our emotion-sharing app called Sensbeat.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) held its annual HKUST One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition to foster entrepreneurship and identify the best business prospects. The Competition is a platform for HKUST community to bring their business ideas focusing on innovative and technology from concept to consumer. Winners can use the cash prize as seed money to form their companies or to realize the commercialization of their inventions. A total of 117 teams participated in the Competition this year. Each team consisted of at least one member of students, faculties, staff and alumni from HKUST’s school of Science, Engineering and Business. An international judging panel comprising leading executives, venture capitalists and entrepreneurial academics shortlisted 12 finalists for the final round of competition.

A group of researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has become the member of a team of physicists from Hong Kong, who has now formally joined one of the most prestigious physics experiments in the world – a top particle physics experiment. Following a unanimous vote of approval today by its Collaboration Board, ATLAS has accepted the Hong Kong team as a member.

A research team led by Prof Nancy Ip, Dean of Science, Director of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience and The Morningside Professor of Life Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has successfully discovered a novel molecular target for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), unveiling a potentially new therapy for the disease. The team recently discovered that aberrant activation of the protein EphA4 is involved in the pathology of AD and identified a naturally occurring compound from a traditional Chinese medicine herb that can block the activity of EphA4. These groundbreaking discoveries have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), a prestigious scientific journal.