Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) — Academic Profile: Hong Kong's Only Veterinary School

Module: 01 Academic · Sub-file: Veterinary medicine, academic profile In October 2023, eleven young people registered in Hong Kong as practising veterinary surgeons — the first cohort ever trained entirely by a local university. City University of Hong Kong's Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) is the only veterinary school in Hong Kong. In partnership with Cornell University in the US, it offers the city's sole six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM). This article focuses on the academic side — history, curriculum, accreditation, departments and research centres. For clinical practice, the animal hospital and diagnostic services, see docs/11. For a college-wide overview, see colleges-and-schools.md.

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# 1. Origins and naming

A note on the timeline: popular accounts often compress the college's birth into "a Cornell partnership in 2017," but the actual sequence is school founded in 2014 → first research centre in 2016 → first BVM cohort in 2017 → named following a Jockey Club donation in 2018. The museum has reconstructed the chronology from the official naming-ceremony announcement and the research centres' official pages.

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# 2. The partnership with Cornell University

The BVM curriculum was developed jointly with Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine in the US, using Cornell's Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) programme as its blueprint (BVM programme overview^※). Cornell CVM has long ranked among the world's leading veterinary schools in the QS subject tables.

This is no name-only arrangement; it is an institutional collaboration that ran deep from the very founding. As early as 2009, CityU approached Cornell CVM for help in establishing the school and securing international accreditation^※. Cornell's involvement spans the strategic planning and design of teaching and clinical facilities, the recruitment of academic leadership and faculty, and the development of the diagnostic laboratories that began in 2016. The partnership has since grown into several standing channels:

This combination — strategic planning, joint PhDs, residency training, whole-class study trips to the US and two-way funding — explains how JCC was able to secure AVBC + RCVS dual accreditation at the first attempt in 2023. Accreditors examine not just the syllabus but faculty qualifications and the depth of clinical training, and these are precisely the areas where Cornell's involvement has been deepest.

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# 3. The Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM)

# International dual accreditation (AVBC + RCVS)

The BVM programme holds dual accreditation from the Australian Veterinary Boards Council (AVBC, approved 21 September 2023)^※ and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) in the UK. CityU describes it as the first veterinary undergraduate programme in Asia accredited by both regulators^※. On the AVBC front, JCC is the first new veterinary school outside Australia and New Zealand to be guided through accreditation^※. Graduates meet the internationally recognised "Day One Competences."

# Small class size and pedagogical approach

The BVM takes in around 30 students a year, while applicants through JUPAS alone have consistently exceeded 1,000^※ — an admission ratio approaching 30:1, making it one of the most competitive of all CityU undergraduate programmes. The small intake is not a purely "elitist" gesture; it is directly tied to the programme's PBL pedagogy. Problem-based learning depends on small-group discussion and intensive clinical mentorship, and once the student-to-staff ratio rises, teaching quality is hard to maintain. This is standard practice in international veterinary education (Cornell's DVM is likewise small by design). For admissions, entry scores and the application process, see 02-admissions/veterinary-bvm-admissions.md.

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# 4. Departments and research centres

# The two departments

# Two interdisciplinary research centres

Alongside the two departments, JCC runs two interdisciplinary research platforms, one pivoting on the public-health side of the "One Health" concept and the other on animal welfare:

• Centre for Applied One Health Research and Policy Advice (OHRP): established in October 2016^※, with a mission to generate scientific knowledge that drives evidence-based policy at the local, national, regional and international levels. Its focus areas are animal production, welfare and health, and infectious disease control. According to the centre's public materials, signature projects include the One Health Poultry Hub, research on using nanobubble technology to reduce antibiotic use in aquaculture, cross-border risk assessment of African swine fever in Southeast Asia, and mobile veterinary services for improving the health of pigs, poultry and fish. The centre's long-term goal is to become a globally recognised "excellence centre for One Health research and policy advocacy."
• Centre for Animal Health and Welfare (CAHW): established, per public records, in 2020; one of CityU's "applied strategic development centres" and, by its own account, the first centre of its kind in Asia^※. The centre supports high-quality, non-invasive animal welfare research and develops evidence-based solutions to the problems affecting animals in contemporary society.

Together, the two centres and two departments form JCC's three-part academic architecture of "clinical teaching + public health + animal welfare."

# Life sciences and postgraduate programmes

Beyond the BVM, JCC offers a Master of Public Health (MPH), a Master of Veterinary Medicine (MVM), PhDs in Infectious Diseases and Public Health and in Veterinary Clinical Sciences, and an interdisciplinary Doctor of Veterinary Medicine^※. These reflect the dual "veterinary + life sciences" positioning grounded in the One Health concept.

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# 5. International rankings: global top 100 in two years, No. 1 in Hong Kong

The BVM has been running for under a decade, and its first graduates have only just begun practising — yet JCC has already put results on the board in the subject rankings:

For a young school that enrolled its first students only in 2017, a "back-to-back global top-100 finish plus Hong Kong's No. 1 spot" is an unusual trajectory. It aligns with the dual international accreditation, the Cornell partnership and the research output of the two centres, all of which together underpin JCC's narrative of "building academic credibility in a short time." For CityU's overall academic standing and a full overview of its subject rankings, see colleges-and-schools.md.

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# 6. Leadership and faculty

JCC's current dean is Professor Vanessa Barrs^※, who also represents the college in external academic and philanthropic engagements (such as the signing of the GX Foundation memorandum of understanding below). The college comprises two departments (Infectious Diseases and Public Health; Veterinary Clinical Sciences) and two research centres (OHRP, CAHW), with faculty spanning clinical veterinary medicine, infectious disease epidemiology, public health policy and animal welfare science — a profile that reflects its interdisciplinary "veterinary + life sciences" positioning (see Section 4 above). The college also maintains an ongoing traffic of visiting senior scholars: external peers, including the dean of Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine, have visited JCC to exchange views with faculty and students on curriculum development and research collaboration.

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# 7. Why CityU set up a veterinary school

CityU's veterinary school was not an "icing on the cake" expansion. It targeted a structural gap in Hong Kong's higher education landscape:

• Hong Kong previously had no local veterinary education. Before JCC, Hong Kong students aspiring to be vets had to go abroad — typically to the UK or Australia — and nearly all practising vets in the city were returnees trained overseas. CityU filled that gap, making it possible for the first time to "study in Hong Kong and practise as a vet in Hong Kong."
• It fits CityU's "find the niche" strategy. CityU is relatively small and young; it cannot easily go head-to-head with older institutions in conventional comprehensive disciplines. Instead it builds irreplaceability in spaces nobody else occupies — and the city's only veterinary school is the strategy in its purest form. (The same logic can be seen in the School of Creative Media's bet on digital media, or the School of Law's focus on the PCLL.)
• The One Health moment. Emerging infectious diseases, zoonoses and food safety are pressing concerns, and "One Health" — the animal-human-ecosystem nexus — has become a key framework in global public health. CityU's combination of veterinary medicine, public health and life sciences is both academically forward-looking and responsive to real needs. The successive establishment of OHRP (2016) and CAHW (2020) is the institutionalisation of that idea, step by step.

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# 8. Milestone: Hong Kong's first locally trained vets (2023)

JCC's "full pipeline" ran end-to-end for the first time in 2023: on 28 October 2023, all 11 graduates of the first BVM cohort registered as practising veterinary surgeons in Hong Kong^※ — the first vets in Hong Kong's history trained entirely on a local degree. These 11 were the students who enrolled in 2017 and completed six years of study; their registration marked the first full validation of the entire chain — curriculum design, clinical rotations, international accreditation and statutory registration (see also docs/11, biomedical-and-health-sciences.md).

"Hong Kong's only veterinary school + Asia's first dual-accredited BVM + the first locally trained vets": these three facts stacked together have turned JCC, within a few short years, from an ambitious idea into a solid milestone in the history of the veterinary profession in Hong Kong.

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# 9. Internationalisation: the most diverse intake yet and a global partnership (2025–2026)

JCC's international character shows not only in its accreditation certificates but in who sits in its classrooms and which partners it courts abroad.

# The most international cohort yet (2025)

In November 2025, CityU announced that the incoming BVM cohort draws students from Germany, Italy, South Africa, Jordan, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, mainland China (including Shanghai) and Macau^※ — the most internationally diverse intake the programme has seen. The college highlighted two case studies: Jalal Abdullah Ali Abdulrahim from Jordan, admitted with a perfect IB score of 45, who said the dual accreditation "means a wider range of career choices after graduation"; and local student Kotler Lee Ching, who achieved six 5** in the HKDSE. CityU offers full or half tuition scholarships, accommodation support and overseas exchange grants of up to HK$500,000^※ to attract top applicants. The composition of this cohort chimes with CityU's concurrent status as the world's most international university, per the Times Higher Education for two consecutive years (2024 and 2025)^※.

# A global partnership with the GX Foundation (2026)

On 22 June 2026, JCC signed a memorandum of understanding with the GX Foundation^※. The GX Foundation is a humanitarian organisation that has been active since 2018 along the Belt and Road — in West Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and Central America — positioning itself as an "externally oriented knowledge organisation." The collaboration focuses on vector-borne disease control, zoonoses prevention, cataract surgeries, disaster resilience and nurturing young humanitarian talent, and will open up student placements in the field and experiential learning opportunities. The memorandum was signed on CityU's behalf by its acting president and JCC dean Professor Vanessa Barrs, and on the GX Foundation's side by its chief executive, Professor Emily Chan Ying-yang. This is JCC's first institutionalised One Health partnership with an overseas humanitarian body at college level, beyond its two research centres OHRP and CAHW — and it opens another route for BVM and postgraduate students to leave Hong Kong and do field work in developing regions.

Read the two threads together: on one side, bringing the world's best applicants in; on the other, sending Hong Kong's veterinary and public-health capacity out. In under a decade, JCC has travelled from "filling a local gap" to "joining the global agenda."

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# 10. A note on tuition fees

Applicants need to be warned: BVM fees for non-local students are far higher than for typical programmes. According to CityU's admissions office, BVM tuition for non-local students is about HK$350,000 for the 2025 intake and about HK$392,000 per year for 2026^※ — and at six years, the cumulative cost is substantial. This stems from the high-cost structure of veterinary education: teaching-hospital-grade facilities (see docs/11), a low student-to-staff ratio and the demands of international accreditation. By comparison, local students entering in 2026 pay about HK$44,500 per year^※, consistent with UGC-funded fee levels — meaning non-local fees are nearly nine times the local rate, a divide unprecedented among CityU's undergraduate programmes. For the full picture on fees and planning, see 02-admissions/tuition-and-scholarships.md.

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