East Asia Watch: How has University of Hong Kong adapted its approach to research during the pandemic?

This blog is the sixth in our series East Asia Watch - exploring how education institutions in East Asia are responding to different challenges that are evolving out of the Covid-19 pandemic. The purpose of the series is two-fold:

• provide UK institutions with a greater understanding of both challenges and expectations of student-sending countries in East Asia
• provide UK institutions with learning points and food for thought when developing their own responses to Covid-19.

“Even though we are in a lock-down situation, most of our research labs have never been closed.”

A UK alumnus and Croucher Scholar, Professor Alfonso H.W. Ngan is Acting Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He recently spoke to British Council staff Cissy Lo, Head of Education & Society Programmes in Hong Kong and Anna Lee, Head of Education Services, North East Asia on how HKU’s research activities have been impacted (or not) by Covid-19, how interdisciplinary research is taking place at the university and shares his positive message on international research collaboration and opportunities with the UK.

British Council: HKU’s research priorities and aims include quality impact, partnership and collaboration. How has Covid-19 impacted the research agenda at HKU and how have the priorities changed?

Professor Ngan: We certainly have tried to react to the situation as best as we can. The Research Grants Committee (RGC) has recently established a new funding scheme through their collaborative research fund. This is on-going and is now soliciting proposals. I would expect a lot of interests from across the university.

Of course, it was quite a difficult time because we were in a lockdown situation. We were trying to avoid face-to-face working but we tried to organise events e.g. the ZOOM forum held in April, where we had a group of our experts telling the audience – those interested in epidemiology and people working on drugs, virus and vaccines - what we’ve been doing in terms of Covid-19. 

Apart from in the medical field, we also had engineers talking about engineering systems that they have been working on, for example for measuring body temperature or systems for rapid diagnosis of the virus. We also had social scientists and education experts discussing contact-tracing and devising a system to track close contacts, which is rather a hot topic within the university at the moment. We have reacted actively on that, and according to Microsoft Academics, they rated our university the top institution in the world in terms of Covid-19 research.

How has the situation impacted our research agenda? Basically, on top of the Covid-19 research, most of our other research never stopped. Even though we were in lockdown, avoiding face-to-face contact, most of the research labs never closed and are open following strict hygiene measures. It’s quite encouraging to see that, although we have been facing a very difficult situation, there have been pretty good research results generated during this critical period that are not related to Covid-19. My office is very glad about that.

British Council: Good to hear that. I thought all the campuses would have been closed. It’s interesting to hear your labs stayed open. Can I ask more about that? In terms of the barriers during this time, you mentioned that the research staff and students are able to access to the lab, but how about researchers from overseas – were their projects put on hold?

Professor Ngan: The majority of our students and researches stayed in Hong Kong throughout the outbreak. Some students from Mainland China returned home for Spring Festival but we arranged a return for those who wanted. Of course, they had to go through quarantine when they came back. After the 14 days, they all returned to the labs as normal. The campus and labs have remained open throughout the outbreak. Only our undergraduate and taught master's courses have gone online. This makes Hong Kong and our university quite different from the universities in the UK. I know a lot of campuses in the UK are in a real lock-down situation.

British Council: HKU has Virtual Forums designed to discuss Covid-19 research, with cross-collaboration between faculties, including social science, engineering and medicine. Was this implemented because of Coivd-19 or has it been happening for a while?

Professor Ngan: As a comprehensive university, we have been exploring cross-faculty interdisciplinary research for several years. It is one of the three ‘I’s (interdisciplinary, internationalisation, innovation) that we treasure a lot at HKU. The government funding schemes in recent years have already encouraged us to do a lot of cross-faculty collaboration. We have established a solid base which allowed our researchers to react quickly to the current situation.

British Council: In terms of research collaboration, we have talked about internal interdisciplinary research, what how about your partners, are they working together with HKU academics, especially those from the UK?

Professor Ngan: In terms of international research, I’d say that it has slowed down quite a lot especially when it comes to dealing with European countries and the US. HKU is a member of Universities21, before Covid-19, there were a lot of activities and meetings arranged for the first half of this year that were all cancelled. U21 has been trying hard to keep something going. But the massive impact has limited us mainly to information sharing, without face-to face and travel it is hard to have intercontinental collaboration because we rely on people moving around for conferences, or sending students away for internship. These kind of exchange activities are not possible nowadays. Even our contact with Mainland China, which is of course much closer than the UK, has been limited. We have to stick to platforms like WeChat and ZOOM, so the cross-continental research collaboration has been affected quite substantially.

British Council: What about private sector and government involvement in recent research or research collaboration that HKU is doing, do they see value and importance in what you are doing?

Professor Ngan: The Research Grants Committee (RGC) has been reacting reasonably quick to the situation but I guess the next phase would be to do more with the midstream and downstream when we are looking at vaccines for example. Universities can only do basic research and perhaps a little bit of midstream research but if we are going to have devices or products, you really need industries to take up the midstream and downstream research. We really hope the likes of the Innovation Technology Bureau (ITB) think hard about getting more involved in academic research and knowledge transfer. They make sure everybody has the reusable masks which is great. For other countries, they adopt more open strategy. We cannot keep closing the border forever. Vaccines will have to be made available for Hong Kong citizens. Our industrial sector should think about that.

British Council: Has HKU started to plan any research collaboration or anything looking beyond Covid-19? Are colleagues exploring new ways of working?

Professor Ngan: I am sure our colleagues in business, and social sciences have been planning. One of the concerns is how to get the economy back to normal after the situation is under control. I know that my colleagues have been working on proposals such as involving think tanks, new ways to do commerce and economic activities. But right now, I’d say that the innovation of vaccines and drugs would be most critical. I mentioned the reason earlier, you cannot keep on wearing masks and keep the border closed forever. And the real problem in Hong Kong is that we do not have a pharmaceutical industry so we do not have the commercial industrial capability to make drugs or vaccines. Even though the formula may be available from the upstream research, you really need the support from midstream and downstream to make the products available for Hong Kong citizens.

British Council: What are the opportunities for research collaboration with partners, especially with UK universities? Is there any key message you want to share with UK institution partners?

Professor Ngan: If we can get out from this Covid-19 situation, I think there are a lot of opportunities, for example the InnoHK project system, in these labs supported by the InnoHK which is the initiative from the ITB. This is about setting up labs and these labs should have an overseas partner. The idea is to do midstream and downstream research and eventually transfer technology to Hong Kong and perhaps the Great Bay area. We have been pretty successful in the first two rounds of calls. We have run nine centres and anticipate there will be future calls. From our past experience, we have been collaborating very well with the UK universities, with partners such as Imperial College. In the future, we’d expect to do more in that direction but we have to wait until this Covid situation dies down and allows people to meet face-to-face again.

Food for thought for UK institutions from IES:

Keep the research community well informed – Universities in Hong Kong have been trying to maintain a sense of normality during these uncertain days. The research community in Hong Kong have found different ways to stay informed and connected, while working remotely by using online communication platforms, such as Zoom, WeChat. They also organised virtual forum to maintain cross-collaboration between faculties and universities.

Changing research priorities - With the support of Research Grant Council, additional funding have been allocated for Covid-19 related research, as the innovation and development of vaccines and drugs would be the most critical during the pandemic.  Their flexibility in research priorities and ability for their researchers to adapt quickly due to:

• having solid research foundations
• drawing on experiences from the 2003 SARS epidemic
• significant government support for studies related to Covid-19

Opportunities for research collaboration – While Hong Kong institutions are recognised for their excellence in conducting world-class quality research, Hong Kong lags behind other developed economies in terms of proportion of public spending on R&D, and lack of support for commercialising the research result.

Aware of the gap, the special administrative region’s leaders have called for a greater effort to make university research more impactful and applicable. One of the major initiatives is InnoHK Clusters. This may open new opportunities for UK institutions to forge and deepen research partnerships with Hong Kong institutions. The increasing focus on research impact may bring opportunities for the UK, including:

• Sharing UK experience of research commercialisation with Hong Kong partners, perhaps to support their applications for funding.
• Sharing lessons learned from the Research Excellence Framework
• Developing expertise in effective science communication

About Professor Ngan

Professor Ngan is currently Kingboard Professor in Materials Engineering, and Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. He obtained his BSc(Eng) degree from the University of Hong Kong in 1989 as the Williamson Prizeman (top Engineering graduate), and PhD from the University of Birmingham in the UK in 1992, where he was awarded the Thomas Turner Prize (best thesis award). After a year of postdoctoral training at Oxford University, supported by the Croucher Foundation, he joined HKU in 1993, and was promoted through the ranks to Chair Professorship in 2011. Prior to his current appointment as Acting Vice-President (Research), he served as Head of Department of Mechanical Engineering from 2017-19, and Associate Dean of Engineering from 2014-17.

His primary responsibilities as Acting Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at HKU cover the planning and execution of strategies in research, innovation, knowledge exchange, technology transfer, entrepreneurship and postgraduate education and research.

The British Council would like to thank Professor Alfonso Ngan for his time and rich insights into research at HKU.

Contributors:

• Anna Lee, Head of Education Services, North East Asia
• Cissy Lo, Head of Education & Society Programmes, Hong Kong