CityU Research: Veterinary Medicine, Life Sciences, Infectious Diseases, Food Safety and the Ocean

City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) consolidated information database · Module 04: Research This article focuses on CityU's research in life / health / environment: the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC), the city's only veterinary school, its One Health agenda, six-year BVM programme and veterinary medical centre; emerging infectious diseases, food safety and animal welfare; and the marine research of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Health (SKLMEH). For a full inventory of institutes and labs, see institutes-and-labs.md; for an overview of research achievements, see overview-achievements.md; for food safety from the campus canteen angle, see 19-canteen-food-safety.

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Why would a university built on business and engineering programmes end up running the only veterinary school in Hong Kong, and leading a national-level marine laboratory to boot? The answer is one word — One Health: the idea that animal, human and environmental health are inseparable. This article follows that thread through CityU's "life–health–environment" research, from the veterinary curriculum and animal hospital, to antibiotic-reduction efforts in farming and aquaculture, to marine pollution monitoring — with dates, funding figures and lead researchers traced to their sources wherever possible.

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# 1. The Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC): Hong Kong's only veterinary school

CityU's most distinctive asset in the life sciences is that it runs the only veterinary school in Hong Kong.

• Timeline: CityU set its sights in 2008^※ on founding the city's first veterinary school — and Asia's first internationally accredited one. The veterinary school was established in 2014, and renamed the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) in 2017 (the name reflecting funding from the Hong Kong Jockey Club). In the same year (2017) the first cohort enrolled in the six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM) (per JCC's official materials).
• Cornell partnership: the BVM was developed jointly with the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, which consistently ranks among the world's leading veterinary schools (per JCC's admissions page^※).
• Dual accreditation: according to a CityU press release (2023-09-25)^※, the JCC's BVM is the first dual-accredited veterinary programme in Asia (holding international accreditation from the UK's Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, RCVS, among others) — a crucial endorsement of its international positioning.

From the 2008 ambition to the first Asian dual accreditation in 2023, the line took fifteen years to run — a journey that crossed site selection and building, the adoption of Cornell's curriculum, first intake, and finally international accreditation. It is a complete specimen of CityU building an institution "from zero to one" in a field outside its traditional strengths.

# 1.1 Four research themes and One Health

JCC's research agenda is built around "One Health" — the principle that animal, human and environmental health cannot be separated. Its BVM curriculum and research, tailored to the Asian veterinary context, run through four themes (per JCC's official materials):

1. Animal Welfare
2. Aquatic Animal Health
3. Emerging Infectious Diseases
4. Food Safety

Underpinning this agenda is the Centre for Applied One Health Research and Policy Advice (OHRP), established in October 2016^※, whose stated purpose is to generate the scientific knowledge that underpins evidence-based policy, from local to international level, for preventing and controlling infectious animal diseases that affect human health and animal production/welfare (per the OHRP website). These four themes are no slogan hung on the wall — they are embedded in the curriculum from day one of Year 1 of the BVM, and they map onto the three research threads that follow: emerging infectious diseases (Section 5, human-to-cat transmission), food safety, and farming and fisheries (Section 4, antimicrobial resistance), and aquatic animal health (Section 4, the fisheries projects).

# 1.2 Two departments, one Dean: JCC's academic skeleton and research strengths

JCC's research is carried by two departments (per CityU Scholars^※):

• Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health: focuses on zoonoses, parasitology, mycology and veterinary public health. The Head is Chair Professor of Parasitology Rebecca Traub, whose research centres on the epidemiology and control of parasitic zoonoses, human soil-transmitted helminths and rickettsial zoonoses.
• Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences: covers clinical medicine, surgery, imaging and clinical pathology; it is the department with the direct teaching–research link to the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre (Section 3).

The Dean of the College is Professor Vanessa Barrs, who also holds the BOCHK Chair Professor of Veterinary Medicine. One research strength that outsiders rarely notice is mycology — JCC has a systematic body of output on One Health fungal pathogens such as azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus and the "Aspergillus viridinutans complex". These drug-resistant fungi threaten humans and animals alike, placing them exactly at the One Health interface. The College's external self-positioning is "to develop a centre of excellence in veterinary and life-science medicine and research under the One Health paradigm, to improve public health, food safety, animal welfare, and help control infectious diseases in Hong Kong and the region" (per JCC's official vision).

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# 2. The six-year BVM: how the curriculum turns "four themes" into veterinarians

Asia's first dual accreditation is the shop sign; what actually holds it up is the curriculum design. The BVM is a six-year undergraduate programme. According to JCC's programme overview^※, it proceeds in three progressive stages:

• Years 1–2 (pre-clinical): biomedical and pre-clinical foundations; students become familiar with normal behaviour across species and learn to restrain animals for health assessment and clinical examination. These two years include pre-requisite coursework and General Education (Gateway Education) credits delivered by Cornell.
• Years 3–4 (para-clinical): the core para-clinical curriculum is taught through problem-based learning, built around two backbone courses — "Animal Body, Function and Dysfunction" and "Host, Agent and Defence" — weaving pathology, pharmacology and infection–immunity into clinical reasoning.
• Years 5–6 (clinical rotations): students enter Clinical Rotations, practising clinical examination and diagnosis, clinical medicine, clinical pathology, therapeutics, pharmacy, anaesthesia, diagnostic imaging, surgery and preventive veterinary medicine under the supervision of qualified veterinarians, and completing a research project.

According to the same official material, students admitted from the 2025/26 academic year take a programme of 243 credits in total; the four themes (animal welfare, aquatic animal health, emerging infectious diseases, food safety) run from day one to graduation. Teaching facilities supporting the programme include a clinical skills laboratory, pathobiology laboratory, dairy farm, surgery and anaesthesia suites, and a necropsy suite.

Why "dual" accreditation rather than single. Per JCC's official materials, the BVM simultaneously benchmarks against two international standards — the UK's Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) and the Australasian Veterinary Boards Council (AVBC) — with the goal of equipping graduates with internationally portable "Day One Competences": the minimum skillset needed to practise independently upon graduation. The two systems cover different jurisdictions (UK/Ireland and Australia/New Zealand), so dual accreditation means CityU graduates' qualifications are directly recognised across a wider span of the English-speaking veterinary world. That is precisely the weight carried by the phrase "Asia's first".

One coincidence on the timeline is worth pointing out: the first BVM cohort enrolled in 2017, and a six-year programme means the first students graduated around 2023 — the very year, September 2023, in which Asia's first dual accreditation was announced. In other words, CityU essentially stamped international mutual recognition onto its first graduates' diplomas just as they walked out the door. For Hong Kong, the programme also fills a long-standing gap: previously the city had no local veterinary degree, so aspiring vets had to study overseas (mostly in the UK and Australia). JCC made "study veterinary medicine in Hong Kong, earn an internationally recognised degree" possible for the first time.

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# 3. A teaching and research heavyweight: CityU Veterinary Medical Centre and its on-site diagnostic laboratory

A veterinary school that wants to turn out vets who can actually treat patients needs more than classrooms — it needs a working hospital. CityU placed that piece of the puzzle in Sham Shui Po: the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre (CityU VMC).

According to CityU News (2019-03-28)^※, the VMC opened in April 2019, with about 33,000 sq ft across three floors. It is one of the largest veterinary centres in Southeast Asia and hosts Hong Kong's biggest specialist veterinary team. On the hardware side, it features Hong Kong's first veterinary intensive care unit (ICU), a cardiology suite, 22 consultation rooms and 9 operating theatres, plus 24-hour emergency services. Specialist services span eight disciplines: surgery, anaesthesiology, neurology, dermatology, cardiology, ophthalmology, internal medicine, and emergency and critical care.

The VMC plays three roles at once, which is what makes it pivotal in CityU's veterinary teaching–research chain:

A detail that is often overlooked is the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. Most Hong Kong veterinary clinics have no in-house laboratory and must send samples out; the VMC, by contrast, is equipped with a STAT (same-day) diagnostic laboratory that can perform most tests on site, run by registered medical laboratory technologists. This shortens the diagnostic cycle and gives JCC's pathology and clinical pathology teaching a local platform. The VMC has also been awarded gold-level "Cat Friendly Clinic" status by the International Society of Feline Medicine (ISFM).

Around the VMC, JCC runs several affiliated entities (per JCC's services page) that spread the teaching and research network wider: the Companion Animal Clinic for community-level primary care, and the CityU Vet Boutique supplying pet products and accessories. These affiliates give BVM students a continuous flow of cases from primary care through to specialist referral, and at the same time put the College's veterinary services within reach of the neighbourhood. From classrooms and skills laboratories, to a referral hospital with an ICU and diagnostic laboratory, to community clinics, CityU assembled a complete clinical training chain in the space of five or six years.

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# 4. Food safety in farming and fisheries: the HK$35 million push on antimicrobial resistance

On the "food safety" theme, JCC's most concrete move was sending veterinarians into Hong Kong's pig farms, poultry farms and fish rafts. According to CityU News^※, in 2019 JCC obtained three grants totalling HK$35 million from the Sustainable Agricultural Development Fund and the Sustainable Fisheries Development Fund, aimed squarely at reducing antimicrobial use and controlling disease in both livestock and fisheries. The three projects break down as follows:

Why cutting antimicrobial use is food safety. Farming and aquaculture have long relied on antibiotics to prevent and treat disease; the more they are used, the greater the selective pressure for antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Resistance genes can travel back to humans through the food chain and the environment — a textbook One Health "human–animal–environment" chain of interconnectedness. The projects' approach is to give farmers tailor-made health plans and free veterinary consultations, using better husbandry and vaccination to bring disease rates down and thereby reduce the dependence on antibiotics at the source, while also guarding against diseases such as African swine fever entering local farms.

# 4.1 Aquatic animal health: taking the "fish vet" to the fish rafts

The fisheries strand is more technical, and forms a research thread of its own. According to a paper published in Scientific Reports (2023)^※, the team found that subsidised veterinary extension services may help reduce antimicrobial resistance in aquaculture — that is, bringing diagnostics and medication guidance directly to the farmer changes medication behaviour more effectively than simply banning or restricting use.

Hong Kong's marine and pond fish farming has long lacked professional "fish vets"; when disease breaks out, farmers typically dose by experience, with timing and dosage hard to get right — leading to treatment failure on one hand and hidden risks of resistance and drug residue on the other. Prof. St-Hilaire's team therefore concentrates on disease prevention at the farm end: investigating the causes of treatment failure in fish and the local drivers of resistance, and testing nanobubble technology — using ultra-fine bubbles to deliver ozone that kills pathogens in pond water and recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) without harming the fish — validated in collaboration with government and academic laboratories in Vietnam and Thailand. According to JCC's official materials^※, the fisheries project serves roughly 945 marine fish farmers and 332 pond fish farmers, building local capacity through veterinary diagnostics, pathogen and parasite surveillance, and the training of local veterinarians via student placements. This thread pushes "food safety" all the way upstream from the testing end to fish fry and water quality — one and the same lineage as the aquatic animal health theme among JCC's four.

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# 5. A landmark study: documented human-to-cat transmission during COVID-19

The story (per the paper in Emerging Infectious Diseases). One of JCC's most noticed pieces of work in emergging infectious diseases is an empirical study on SARS-CoV-2 infection in domestic cats, conducted in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the paper "SARS-CoV-2 in Quarantined Domestic Cats from COVID-19 Households or Close Contacts, Hong Kong", published in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (December 2020 issue)^※, the team tested respiratory and faecal samples from 50 quarantined domestic cats from COVID-19 households or close contacts and found 6 suspected "human-to-cat" infections; for one cat and its owner, the viral genome sequences were completely identical.

One of the study's authors is Professor Vanessa Barrs, the JCC's Chair Professor of Companion Animal Health and Disease (Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health). The work is a textbook case of One Health "disease transmission at the human–animal interface", and it shows the real-world public health relevance of CityU's veterinary research — a single batch of quarantine samples revealing how the whole "human–animal–environment" transmission chain can be dissected by scientific method.

It is worth adding that Prof. Barrs's research is not limited to COVID. According to her published research profile, she is a feline medicine specialist who also works on mycology and molecular microbiology, with a long-standing interest in infectious diseases of companion animals. That, together with JCC's livestock disease control work in pigs, poultry and fish (Section 4), makes up the width of CityU's One Health research — from pets to production animals, from individual case sequencing to industry-wide antimicrobial reduction, all within the same "interface transmission" framework.

# 5.1 An "interface map": four sites of JCC's emerging infectious disease research

Laying the scattered threads side by side shows that CityU's veterinary infectious disease research is no single point but a set of positions across the human–animal–environment interface, each with its own independent source:

This map also supplies the other half of the answer to "why does Hong Kong need a veterinary school": Hong Kong is densely populated, pets are ubiquitous, and it is a trading hub for live poultry and food animals — the human–animal interface is unusually dense. Placing veterinary medicine, public health and environmental research in the same college, strung together by One Health, is precisely the institutional arrangement for managing that kind of interface risk. According to Times Higher Education's One Health hub page^※, it was cross-border outbreaks such as avian influenza that pushed "One Health" onto the international agenda — and CityU's founding of a veterinary school moved in step with that global shift.

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# 6. Life sciences and biomedicine

Beyond veterinary medicine, CityU also produces work in the life sciences (the Department of Biomedical Sciences, intersecting chemistry and biology), covering infection and immunity, structural biology, biomedical engineering and more; some of this work is done in collaboration with JCC and the Institute of Digital Medicine (IDM, see institutes-and-labs.md).

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# 7. Marine and environmental health research (SKLMEH): from estuary monitoring to a UNESCO centre

CityU's leading position in marine science is embodied in the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Health (SKLMEH, formerly the State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution, SKLMP).

• Platform: SKLMP was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology in November 2009^※ and established in 2010. It is Hong Kong's leading marine research platform, bringing together more than 50 interdisciplinary researchers from eight local universities (HKU, HKUST, CUHK, PolyU, CityU, HKBU, EdUHK, HKMU)^※; in 2025 it was reorganised and renamed SKLMEH (for the full history, see institutes-and-labs.md).
• Directions: marine pollution and ecotoxicology, coral health and conservation, microplastic monitoring, estuarine contaminants, deep-sea environmental impacts, pathogen surveillance in aquaculture, and more.
• Leadership: the Director is Prof. Kenneth Leung (梁美儀), Chair Professor of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (per the SKLMEH website^※).

# 7.1 The UN-endorsed "Global Estuaries Monitoring (GEM)" decade programme

The laboratory's most internationally visible flagship is leading the UN-endorsed "Global Estuaries Monitoring (GEM)" programme. According to public materials, GEM is a Decade Action under the UN "Ocean Decade" (2021–2030, the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development), running for ten years. Its goal is to build a unified monitoring network in the estuaries of major cities worldwide, sampling and experimentally studying environmental contaminants there (including micro- and nanoplastics), and to propose management strategies for "cleaner estuaries". Prof. Leung also serves as the GEM programme director — connecting a Hong Kong laboratory's methodology to a global-scale estuarine governance agenda.

Why fixate on "estuaries". Estuaries are the throat through which rivers meet the sea — and the last checkpoint before land-based pollutants enter the ocean. Urban sewage, industrial wastewater, agricultural runoff and plastic waste mostly leave through estuaries, and estuaries are simultaneously among the most fisheries-rich and biodiverse waters. Choosing estuaries as monitoring sites means grasping the single most information-dense link in the "land-source pollution entering the sea" chain. GEM extends standardised sampling and analysis methods to the estuaries of major cities worldwide, allowing monitoring that was previously fragmented and methodologically inconsistent to be compared laterally for the first time — precisely the stage on which the standardised microplastic methods (Section 7.3) can shine. For CityU, leading a UN Ocean Decade action marks its marine research leaping from "local frontrunner" to "global agenda-setter".

# 7.2 Hong Kong's first UNESCO regional training and research centre

In 2023, SKLMP added another international badge. According to EurekAlert! (2023-04-27)^※, approved at the 14th session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) Sub-Commission for the Western Pacific (WESTPAC), CityU established the Coastal Pollution Monitoring Regional Training and Research Centre (Coastal-COMMIT Centre) — Hong Kong's first UNESCO regional training and research centre, the third in China and the sixth in the Western Pacific region (WESTPAC now has 22 member states). The Centre aims to strengthen marine pollution monitoring capacity in the Western Pacific, promote innovative marine technology, and foster international research cooperation, again with Prof. Leung as Director. From a state key laboratory, to a UN Decade programme, to a UNESCO regional centre, CityU's international marine research interfaces have stacked up year after year.

# 7.3 Ecotoxicology, standard methods for microplastics, and "ecological engineering"

The scientific bedrock of SKLMEH is marine ecotoxicology. Prof. Leung himself holds a PhD in marine ecotoxicology from the University of Glasgow and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, covering marine ecology, pollution, ecotoxicology, environmental risk assessment and ecological restoration — the methodology that underpins the laboratory's external monitoring and remediation contracts.

On microplastics, one practical contribution is the standard monitoring method: according to SKLMP's public materials^※, the team established scientific standard methods for microplastics in sewage, seawater, freshwater and rainwater, across two size fractions (0.3–5 mm and 0.02–0.3 mm), so that data across different studies become comparable. Using this toolkit, the team has tracked the distribution of microplastics in Hong Kong waters and its response to rainfall and Pearl River discharge, and investigated land-to-sea pathways such as urban stormwater drains and sewage treatment works — tracing the plastic in the sea back through the city's pipe networks.

Another line of work, which the laboratory calls "eco-engineering", goes beyond monitoring pollution to actively restoring habitats: the "Oyster SOS" programme collects discarded oyster shells from the restaurant trade to rebuild oyster reefs, creating habitat for marine life; "Eco-Seawalls" ecologically retrofit artificial seawalls so that bare concrete grows attached organisms. These efforts extend SKLMEH's role from "diagnostician of marine pollution" to "restorer of coastal habitats".

The marine direction overlaps with CityU's School of Energy and Environment and the Hong Kong Institute for Clean Energy (HKICE) on environmental health issues (see institutes-and-labs.md).

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# 8. Summary

• Veterinary medicine: CityU runs Hong Kong's only veterinary school (JCC). Established in 2014, renamed in 2017 with the first BVM intake; a six-year programme developed with Cornell; in 2023 it secured Asia's first RCVS+AVBC dual accreditation, with the first cohort graduating around the same year. The College comprises the Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health and the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences; the Dean is Prof. Barrs.
• Hospital: the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre (approx. 33,000 sq ft, eight specialist disciplines, ICU and on-site diagnostic laboratory), opened in 2019, is the home of BVM clinical rotations and doubles as a referral centre and community clinic, completing the chain from classroom to bedside.
• Food safety and antimicrobial reduction: three projects totalling HK$35 million in 2019 sent veterinarians into pig farms, poultry farms and fish rafts, reducing antimicrobial use at the production end, controlling African swine fever and fish disease, and testing technologies such as nanobubbles in aquaculture.
• Infectious diseases: typified by the human-to-cat transmission study, plus antimicrobial reduction in livestock and aquaculture and drug-resistant fungi, covering multiple sites across the human–animal–environment interface.
• Ocean: the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Health (SKLMEH), co-built by eight universities under Director Prof. Kenneth Leung, leads the UN Ocean Decade's GEM estuary monitoring programme, established Hong Kong's first UNESCO regional centre, and is known for its ecotoxicology, standardised microplastic methods, and oyster-reef / eco-seawall restoration.
• All of these threads are strung together by one through-line — One Health. For the institutional history of the platforms, see institutes-and-labs.md; for an overview of research achievements, see overview-achievements.md.

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