eringThree women faculty members explain what they find most rewarding about their careers As an undergraduate, I studied agricultural and biological engineering at Cornell University, with the coursework spanning life science and engineering subjects. After graduation, I went to work at the worldfamous Merck Research Laboratories as a biochemical engineer. During my time there, I learned how to apply engineering skills to drug delivery and vaccine manufacturing, and I saw the demand for bioengineering research in the pharmaceutical industry. I then decided to take my Master’s (University of Pennsylvania) and PhD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I had been encouraged to become an engineer by my father, who was a practicing electronic engineer. He emphasized the importance of quantitative thinking and problemsolving skills and he felt that engineering provided such training. He was also visionary because he could see the promise of engineering applications in life science and biotechnology in the future and suggested I pursued my major in this area. I joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the School of Engineering in 2006. As I am from Hong Kong, I decided to return to the city when offered the opportunity. Currently, my two main areas of research are drug delivery for the treatment of eye diseases and the research of nano materials for building the next generation of therapeutic carriers. I really find my research intellectually interesting. At the same time, such work can benefit people’s lives. Both motivate me to keep finding out more. In teaching, I have initiated a project called Student Innovation for Global Health Technology (SIGHT). SIGHT provides a platform for students from different disciplines (not only engineering) to take part in projects with social impact. Based on the framework of design thinking, students brainstorm, prototype, and implement practical solutions for low-resource settings. Our first projects were carried out in Cambodia. I found this trip very meaningful as students had the chance to put their ideas into practice and clearly found it a transformational experience. I like to think that I and women faculty in general serve as role models for women students. If female students are interested in engineering, they should go ahead to join the field. I enjoy the freedom of doing what I enjoy (SIGHT, conducting research), and also my interaction with different people, such as my research team, students, and scientists from all over the world. However, the most rewarding aspect to me is mentoring – transferring knowledge and values to students, and witnessing their growth during the most transformative years of their lives. Prof Ying Chau Associate Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering · PhD in Chemical Engineering, MIT · Biochemical Engineer, Merck Research Labs, US · Research interests: biomedical engineering; drug delivery; cancer targeting; tissue engineering and the Unix operating system. I thought I would like to go there. So I went to university in the US and chose to major in electrical engineering. In college I realized that I preferred software to hardware. For my final year project, I worked on computer vision, an area in artificial intelligence. I also finished an undergraduate humanities thesis on French movies. All of which led me to study in an engineering school in Paris later on. There I had my first encounter with speech recognition in a lab. I worked on speech recognition systems for the French language, and on Japanese when I lived in Japan. I learned to speak French, Japanese and also taught machines to recognize these languages. Afterward, I moved back to the US and worked for a US-DARPA contractor company (the same company that built the first part of ARPANET, the beginning of our Internet today). We built the world’s first real-time continuous English speech recognition system. When I was doing my PhD, my thesis advisor told me about machine translation. There was a group at Bell Labs and a group at IBM research labs pioneering a way to build machine translation by enabling the system to learn from a huge amount of human translation samples. I did part of my thesis work at Bell Labs. So, yes, I finally got to build the gadget I saw in Star Trek when I was little. Computers that can talk to you and allow you to shop from home are part of real life now. However, we still have a long way to go before we have machines that can understand your intent, your emotion and the context perfectly. Every year we make progress in research and bring the future a little closer. When I went to the US to study my ambition was to work at Bell Labs. However, in 1994, I visited HKUST and was fascinated by the vision of a “startup” university that was going to break the mold. So, when I got my PhD, I decided that it would be more fun to join HKUST than stay at Bell Labs. At HKUST in 1998, we built the world’s first multilingual voice browser in eight languages. To be continued on P.14 In Focus 8
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDk5Njg=