LU honours scholars for outstanding research and knowledge transfer

Lingnan University (LU) highly values research and knowledge transfer that generate social impact and demonstrate care for the community. LU honoured 72 LU faculty members for their outstanding performance in research and contributions to knowledge transfer in raising the community’s quality of life and contribution to society during the 2021/22 and 2022/23 academic years.

 

Three of the awards including Research Output Excellence Award, Young Researcher Output Award, and Research & Knowledge Transfer Fund Award were presented in the Research & KT Excellence Awards Presentation Ceremony 2022 cum Exhibition of Knowledge Transfer/Entrepreneurship Projects.

 

Prof Wong Yuk-shan, Chairman of the Research Grants Council, and Prof James Tang Tuck-hong, Secretary-General of the University Grants Committee attended the ceremony as officiating guests. They joined Mr Andrew Yao Cho-fai, Chairman of the Council of LU, Prof Leonard K Cheng, President of LU and Prof Joshua Mok Ka-ho, Vice-president of LU to switch on lightings of celebration on stage at the ceremony.

 

Prof Wong Yuk-shan, Chairman of the Research Grants Council (RGC), delivered a congratulatory speech, in which he thanked Prof Leonard K Cheng and Prof Joshua MOK for their efforts in promoting research, nurturing research culture, and building up research infrastructure on campus. "In the year 2021/22, LU was ranked third worldwide for ‘Quality Education’ in the latest Times Higher Education Impact Rankings and also achieved remarkable results in UGC's Research Assessment Exercise 2020. I have strong confidence that LU will be able to contribute significantly in all aspects of interdisciplinary studies," he said.

 

In his congratulatory remarks, Prof James Tang Tuck-hong expressed his appreciation for LU’s contributions to innovation and creativity for everyone’s benefit.  He said, “LU’s excellent research teams have contributed their expertise in translating research outcomes into useful real-world applications. Particularly worth highlighting are Lingnan’s signature inventions of transparent anti-Covid face mask for persons with hearing impairment, as well as the ‘CREW wheelchair’, which have won gold and silver medals at the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions. These achievements exemplify the Lingnanian spirit of placing people first in academic pursuit which Hong Kong can be truly proud of.”

 

Mr Andrew Yao Cho-fai, Chairman of the Council of LU said in his opening address that with the university’s strong capabilities in scientific research, coupled with partnerships with universities within the Greater Bay Area, the University will also endeavour to step up efforts in driving the development of a vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem in the area and beyond. “ We will establish a new research and learning centre in Shenzhen to explore opportunities as well as forge international collaborations and further take our KT work to fruition to bring benefits to the lives of the community. These initiatives facilitate our interaction with industries and stakeholders, and help us grow,’’ he added.

 

LU President Prof Leonard K Cheng said that he has always taken great pride in colleagues’ and students’ commitment to high quality research. “Their accomplishments in the past years have been well reflected in the excellent results we obtained in the 2022/23 Research Grants Council (RGC) funding exercise, under which a record-high of 37 RGC competitive grant projects received funding that totalled $16 million, the largest sum ever over the past years,” he said. He added that the steady flow of peer-reviewed papers in prestigious academic journals has also enhanced Lingnan’s international standing and contributed to policy-making. “I am particularly glad to see our faculty members seeking collaborations and forging partnerships with the government and industry. We are very pleased to present a special award to recognise their efforts in Government-Industry-Academia collaboration,” he said.

 

In his closing remarks, Vice-president Prof Joshua Mok Ka-ho encouraged all colleagues and students to work closely together for building a better society through LU's impactful research. "When we celebrate our success today, don't forget many of our faculty members, they have been working very hard. Building a strong community of research, we need to reach out to them, supporting each other to make Lingnan a stronger research community, serving the community at large, and helping our younger generation to know all about the betterment of the society," he said.

 

Table 1.

Awardee List	Research Output
Research Output Excellence Award
Prof Denise TANG, Department of Cultural Studies	Everyday erotics in urban density: an ethnography of older lesbian and bisexual women in Hong Kong, in Gender, Place and Culture
	Legal recognition of same-sex partnerships: A comparative study of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, in The Sociological Review
	Of longing and waiting: An inter-Asia approach to love and intimacy among older lesbians and bisexual women, in Sexualities
Prof XIE Haoran, Department of Computing and Decision Sciences	Towards Purchase Prediction: A Transaction-based Setting and A Graph-based Method Leveraging Price Information, in Pattern Recognition
	Learning Representation from Multiple Media Domains for Enhanced Event Discovery, in Pattern Recognition
	Fast supervised topic models for short text emotion detection, in IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
Prof Victoria YEUNG, Department of Applied Psychology	Merely possessing a placebo analgesic improves analgesia similar to using the placebo analgesic, in Annals of Behavioral Medicine
	Prior pain exposure and mere possession of a placebo analgesic predict placebo analgesia: Findings From a Randomized, Double-Blinded, Controlled Trial, in Journal of Pain
	I own therefore I can: efficacy-based mere ownership effect, in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Prof Jonathan FONG, Science Unit	Integrating and updating wildlife conservation in China, in Current Biology
	Comparative Analysis of the Fecal Microbiota of Wild and Captive Beal’s Eyed Turtle (Sacalia bealei) by 16S rRNA Gene Sequencing, in Frontiers in Microbiology
	Phylogenetic Systematics of the Water Toad (Bufo stejnegeri) Elucidates the Evolution of Semi-aquatic Toad Ecology and Pleistocene Glacial Refugia, in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Young Researcher Output Award
Prof Janet HO, Department of English	Discursive representations of domestic helpers in cyberspace, in Discourse Studies
	“I found what I felt like I was born to do”: Exploring corporate legitimacy through video interviews with Elizabeth Holmes, in Discourse, Context, & Media
	Purposeful life or sugar-coated lies: How Elizabeth Holmes legitimised her fraud, in Language and Communication
Prof Victor LI, Department of Marketing and International Business	Triadic embeddedness structure in family networks predicts mobile communication response to a sudden natural disaster, in Nature Communications
	Exploring Embeddedness, Centrality, and Social Influence on Backer Behavior: the Role of Backer Networks in Crowdfunding, in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
	The citation trap: Papers published at year-end receive systematically fewer citations, in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Prof HUANG Yi, Department of Applied Psychology	Intranasal oxytocin in the treatment of autism spectrum disorders: A multilevel meta-analysis, in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
	Letter: Distinct neural patterns underlying ingroup and outgroup conformity, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
	Common and distinct neural substrates of the money illusion in win and loss domains, in NeuroImage
Prof SUNG Yik Hei, Science Unit	Prevalence of illegal turtle trade on social media and implications for wildlife trade monitoring, in Biological Conservation
	Ecological correlates of 20-year population trends of wintering waterbirds in Deep Bay, South China, in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
	International socioeconomic inequality drives trade patterns in the global wildlife market, in Science advances