Crises to opportunities rom Hong Kong’s social unrest to the global COVID- crisis, the academic year has been unprecedented for higher education in the city. To look a er our students, the School of Engineering moved swi ly to extend earlier moves toward blended learning – a mix of face-to-face instruction and online or digital course components – to successfully deliver a full complement of interactive online teaching during the virus-a ected Spring semester. We proactively trained faculty in online methodologies and interaction while keeping to class schedules as originally planned, and were rewarded with notable results, including feedback surveys that showed that the majority of students have been satisfied with such virtual practices. Indeed, I now see a fascinating window of opportunity where mindsets on both the teaching and learning sides become ready and willing to embrace new engineering education approaches, having experienced for themselves how e ective these methods can be. I am also immensely proud of the immediate response and willingness of the School’s faculty and alumni to adapt and roll out novel research-based applications that have contributed to prevention and mitigation of the pandemic in Hong Kong and beyond. As our Cover Story shows, the School has produced not one but a host of innovative technologies in areas ranging from mass temperature screening and early vaccine target identification to self-driving delivery vehicles in locked-down areas and computer modeling demonstrating the significance of populations’ widespread use of face masks. Such scope is evidence of the wide-reaching and relevant research being pursued at the School, the impact it can generate, and the essential role of engineering in managing complex crises. This time we have faced an implacable disease. Tomorrow, it could be climate change or IT security issues that require immediate action. What it also demonstrates is the need for investment in research over the long term in order to be prepared for emergencies. For the technologies that our faculty members have been able to deploy were not created in an instant but are the result of years of careful, continuous discovery and development. Alongside our response to the pandemic, the School has been deeply involved in planning and advancement of HKUST’s visionary Guangzhou campus, scheduled to open in . Rather than discipline-specific schools and departments, HKUST(GZ) will be structured around a pioneering hub concept, namely the areas of function, information, systems, and society. These hubs will be driven by multidisciplinary thinking and collaboration, technology transfer, and impact, with engineering fields having a strong presence in all four. Teaming this cutting-edge approach in a complementary way with the University’s already established global research leadership and recent online interactive teaching and learning insights, the future certainly looks exciting for HKUST engineering. Prof. Tim CHENG Kwang-Ting Dean of Engineering 03 IN FOCUS Dean’s View F
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