Biographies of Key Figures

This article presents in-depth biographies of several representative figures at CityU: two former presidents (Chang Hsin-kang, Way Kuo), one representative recruited scholar (Hua Zhang), and one representative alumnus (Wong Chun). The biographies focus on life trajectories and their roles at CityU; a list of purely honorary/title-related credentials can be found in ./academicians-and-awards.md, and cross-comparisons of scholarly contributions in ./faculty-and-leaders.md.

Editorial note: All four individuals covered here are former presidents or non-leadership individuals, falling within the neutral factual zone, and are named accordingly. CityU's current and recent leadership (the acting president, the recently resigned former president, and the Council chairman) are not covered in this article; their personal histories appear under the relevant titles in the administration/wild-history modules.

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Four biographies, two strikingly different life trajectories. Two engineering-trained presidents, each heading in an unexpected direction after retirement — one delving into the history of interactions between Chinese and Western civilisations, the other writing monographs on higher education. A materials scientist recruited from Nanyang Technological University turns the concept of "phase engineering" into the namesake of an international conference. And a graduate of the School of Creative Media makes a low-budget film about bipolar disorder and takes home the Golden Horse Award for Best New Director. In different ways, these four individuals reflect the multiple paths by which this young university has "built itself on people."

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# Chang Hsin-kang (張信剛) — From Biomedical Engineering to Cultural Literacy, the "Scholar-President"

# Early Life and Academic Origins

Chang Hsin-kang was born in Shenyang, Liaoning, in 1940^※, was educated in Taiwan, and graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering at National Taiwan University in 1962^※, before moving to the United States for graduate study: an M.S. in structural engineering from Stanford University in 1964 and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University in 1969^※. He belongs to the generation of Chinese scholars who went to America after the war and entered the then-emerging interdisciplinary field of biomedical engineering; his research concerned the mechanics and modelling of physiological systems, and he has published over 100 English-language academic papers^※.

# An Academic and Administrative Career Spanning North America and Hong Kong

In one sentence: before assuming the CityU presidency, Chang had accumulated nearly three decades of teaching, research, and administrative experience in the university systems of the United States and Canada — rising from assistant professor to dean of engineering. This multinational track record was the foundation for the general-education reforms he later championed at CityU.

According to publicly compiled sources on the Chinese Wikipedia^※, his early academic trajectory was as follows:

Notably, his move from civil engineering assistant professor to biomedical engineering professor in a medical faculty spanned two disciplinary systems — engineering and medicine. This experience of "crossing disciplinary boundaries" foreshadowed, in fact, his post-retirement turn towards the humanities: from engineering to medicine, and then to the humanities, the same "boundary-crossing intellectual curiosity" projected three times. His 1990 appointment as founding dean of engineering at HKUST^※, where he helped lay the foundations of the engineering school at a university then still under construction, came six years before he took the helm at CityU — making him one of the few scholars to have "personally witnessed the early institutional formation of two of Hong Kong's new technology-focused universities."

# His Role at CityU

Chang was one of the longest-serving early presidents of CityU after its formal designation as a university in 1994 (11 years in office^※). A distinctive orientation of his tenure was an emphasis on general education and culture: he served as chairman of the Culture and Heritage Commission of the Hong Kong SAR from 2000 to 2003^※, was awarded the Gold Bauhinia Star (GBS) by the Hong Kong SAR Government in 2002 in recognition of his contributions to education, culture, and technology^※, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2000^※.

Both during and around his presidency, he concurrently held a range of cross-sector public appointments. According to the Chinese Wikipedia compilation^※: he was appointed a Justice of the Peace from 1999^※; served on the Judicial Officers Recommendation Commission from 1999 to 2005^※; sat on the Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee from 2000 to 2004^※; and served two consecutive terms as a member of the 10th and 11th National Committees of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) from 2003 to 2013^※. This record of public service shows that even during his presidency he was not merely a scholar absorbed in university administration, but also a public intellectual active in cultural and education policy circles on both sides of the border — foreshadowing his post-retirement turn to general-education writing and lecturing aimed at a broad audience.

# The "Second Life" After Retirement: Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Civilisations and the Humanities

What distinguishes Chang is his post-retirement pivot to the humanities and civilisational exchange: after retiring in 2007, he taught general-education humanities courses at Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shandong University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Boğaziçi University in Turkey^※, and holds honorary professorships at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Northeastern University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, and others; he has published twelve books in Chinese and English^※, spanning technology, history, culture, and civilisational exchange.

According to his English-language academic profile, in addition to biomedical engineering, he has published eleven Chinese-language books focused on education, culture, and civilisation, with an intellectual focus on civilisational and cultural exchange across the Eurasian landmass, with particular emphasis on the Silk Road^※. This orientation towards dialogue between Chinese and Western civilisations culminates in works such as Fifteen Lectures on Silk Road Civilisation (Peking University Press, 2018, in the "Distinguished Scholars' Lecture Series")^※, giving him an additional identity as a "lecturer on the history of civilisations" beyond being an engineering-trained president.

Fifteen Lectures on Silk Road Civilisation is based on a general-education course he taught at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The book's fifteen lectures begin with the origins of prehistoric civilisation and trace Alexander's eastern campaign, Zhang Qian's opening of the Western Regions, the eastward transmission of Buddhism, the Sogdian merchant caravans, the westward transmission of paper and the eastward journey of the alphabet, the founding and spread of Islam, and finally the reshaping of the Eurasian civilisational order by the Turkic westward migration and the Mongol conquests^※ — a comprehensive history of civilisational exchange written by an engineer. That crossover is itself the most conspicuous label of his retirement years. Beyond this book, his recent works include Selling Water by the River: Selected Speeches of Chang Hsin-kang (bilingual English–Chinese), A Journey through the Greater Middle East, Musings on the Banks of the Nile, The Cultivation of a University, and Tea and Coffee^※, ranging from Middle East travelogues to reflections on higher education and a cultural history of beverages — continuing his established pattern of "an engineer writing general-interest books across disciplines."

On the governance of higher education, he remarked in an interview with Time Weekly on 23 November 2010^※: 「中国大陆不应该再让大学的运作以官本位的思想折射出来：哪个校长是正局级，哪个校长是副厅级」 ("Mainland China should no longer let university operations be refracted through rank-conscious official thinking — which president is at the bureau level, which president is at the departmental level"), arguing that university governance should centre on academic values rather than administrative hierarchy, and citing the relative freedom of Hong Kong university presidents from bureaucratic interference as a contrast. "A scientist by training who built a second life on dialogue between Chinese and Western civilisations" — that is the label that distinguishes Chang from the typical engineering-trained university president.

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# Way Kuo (郭位) — Master of Reliability Engineering and Commentator on Higher Education

# Academic Background and Contributions to Reliability Engineering

Kuo was born in Taipei in 1951^※, received a B.S. in nuclear engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in 1972^※ and a Ph.D. in engineering from Kansas State University in the United States in 1980^※; he worked at Bell Laboratories and subsequently held professorships at Texas A&M University and the University of Tennessee, where he served as Dean of the College of Engineering and Distinguished Professor^※.

At the core of his academic lineage is the reliability design of electronic systems, particularly the modelling of systems' reliability during their "infant mortality" stage. According to his CityU Scholars profile, he is described as "a pioneer in reliability research of systems at their infant stage"^※, with a research focus on system reliability engineering, the mathematics of burn-in ageing, and reliability optimisation design. The authoritative endorsement of this scholarly contribution is his 2000 election to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), with the citation "For contributions to reliability design for microelectronics products and systems"^※. His work on a unified framework linking burn-in, yield, and reliability in microelectronics is consolidated in the monograph Reliability, Yield, and Stress Burn-In (Kluwer/Springer)^※, widely regarded as a classic in the field.

Note: Some biographical materials in circulation also credit him with an "IEEE Lifetime Achievement Award in Reliability, the first Chinese person in nearly fifty years to receive this honour." As this archive has found no independent official or academic primary source corroborating either that specific award or the claim of being "the first Chinese recipient," we do not adopt it as fact and present his reliability-engineering lineage solely through the traceable NAE citation and his CityU Scholars profile.

# Academic Distinctions

Kuo is one of the rare "multi-academy fellows": elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2000^※, an Academician of Taiwan's Academia Sinica, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Engineering; he is also a Fellow of IEEE, INFORMS, the American Society for Quality, the American Statistical Association, and other professional societies.

# His Role at CityU and Educational Philosophy

Kuo became CityU's fourth president in May 2008 and stepped down in May 2023^※, and during his tenure he advocated the educational principles of "uniting teaching and research, and separating politics from education"^※; after stepping down, the Council conferred on him the titles of President Emeritus and University Distinguished Professor^※. During his presidency, CityU entered the top 100 in several world university rankings and established new units including the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (Hong Kong's only veterinary school). A fuller biography of his fifteen-year tenure of scholarship and administration appears in the dedicated article ./fourth-president-reliability-scholar.md.

Kuo is also an active author on higher education: he wrote Heartware: A University President's Reflections on Education, expounding his views on higher education from four perspectives — internationalisation, the unity of teaching and research, quality and evaluation, and creativity and innovation^※, advocating the equal weighting of teaching and research, the integration of industry and academia, and the employment of talent on merit alone. He has also written public commentary on energy and nuclear power, bringing his professional perspective in reliability engineering into energy-policy debates.

Note: The governance struggles and certain controversies at CityU during Kuo's tenure are filed in this archive under the administration/wild-history module; this article records only the neutral facet of his scholarship and educational philosophy.

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# Hua Zhang (张华) — Pioneer of "Phase Engineering" of Nanomaterials

# Academic Trajectory

Hua Zhang is the foremost example among the senior materials scientists CityU has recruited from abroad over the past decade or so. He earned his B.S. and M.S. from Nanjing University and completed his Ph.D. at Peking University under Professor Zhongfan Liu^※. He then rose rapidly in materials chemistry, spent a long career on the faculty of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and later joined CityU, where he is currently Herman Hu Chair Professor of Nanomaterials and Chair Professor of Chemistry/Materials Science. He and the other imported scholar with an engineering background, Way Kuo (above), are two variants of the same narrative: one built on a theoretical framework of reliability engineering, the other on a countable, citable volume of highly cited papers — together illustrating CityU's standard practice of "propelling rankings with top imported scholars" (for cross-comparison, see ./faculty-and-leaders.md).

# Scholarly Contribution: Phase Engineering of Nanomaterials (PEN)

Zhang's signature original contribution is the proposal and systematic development of the concept of "Phase Engineering of Nanomaterials (PEN)" — the tuning of the crystal phase of nanomaterials (including unconventional phases and amorphous structures) to open new avenues for applications in catalysis, clean energy, optoelectronic devices, sensing, water treatment, and more. He has made foundational contributions to the synthesis of ultrathin two-dimensional nanomaterials and metallic nanomaterials with unconventional crystal phases. The full technical detail of this research arc — from the first synthesis of hcp-phase gold nanoplates templated on graphene oxide, to the institutionalisation of PEN as a discipline at the 2024 Nature Conference — is covered in the dedicated article 04-research/hua-zhang-2d-nanomaterials-phase.md.

# Scholarly Influence

Zhang is a core member of CityU's "highly cited scholars" cohort: he has published over 550 papers with over 100,000 citations and an h-index exceeding 160^※; since 2014/2015 he has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher every year in both Materials Science and Chemistry; and he has been elected a Foreign Member of the European Academy of Sciences^※ and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. His case typifies CityU's development path of "using materials science as a flagship and rapidly building international visibility through recruited senior highly cited scholars."

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# Wong Chun (黃進) — Golden Horse New Director from the School of Creative Media

# Training at CityU's School of Creative Media

Wong Chun is one of the most representative film alumni of CityU's School of Creative Media (SCM). Born in Hong Kong in 1988, he graduated from Methodist College in 2007 and entered CityU's School of Creative Media, majoring in film art; he graduated in 2011^※. Founded in 1998, SCM is one of the few schools in Hong Kong that places film, new media art, and digital creation side by side in its curriculum; Wong's trajectory is a footnote to the school's training model. The school's disciplinary structure, research directions, and flagship facility (the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre) are covered in 04-research/creative-media-and-data-research.md.

Before his feature debut, Wong had already made a name for himself on the short-film circuit for students and emerging directors: his short film March 6th was shortlisted for the Best Creative Short Film award at the 49th Golden Horse Awards^※; and his 2014 short Good Take was selected for the Asia-Pacific Film Festival and other international festivals^※. This accumulation of short-film work was the direct training ground that enabled him to complete his feature debut on a shoestring budget while maintaining control of the overall narrative rhythm.

# Mad World: 16 Days, HK$2 Million, Golden Horse New Director

Wong's first feature, 《一念无明》 (Mad World, 2016), focuses on a bipolar disorder patient and his family, and on Hong Kong's mental-health and housing predicament. The film was completed on a budget of roughly HK$2 million and a 16-day shooting schedule^※, was world-premiered at the 41st Toronto International Film Festival as the only Hong Kong film selected that year^※, and grossed HK$18.82 million at the Hong Kong box office^※ — the contrast between the minuscule budget and the outsized box-office and awards returns is itself one of the film's most frequently cited footnotes. The film went on to sweep multiple awards across the Chinese-language film world:

This work, made on an extremely low budget, is regarded as one of the representative works of Hong Kong's new generation of realist cinema.

# After the Debut: From Creator to Industry Juror

The success of Mad World quickly moved Wong from "emerging creator" into the jury and mentoring systems of the Hong Kong film industry: in 2017 he served as a mentor at the 54th Golden Horse Film Academy^※, guiding a new generation of Chinese-language filmmakers; and in 2019 he served as a juror for the second round and final round of the 56th Golden Horse Awards^※, turning from an award-winning newcomer into one who judges others. A search of publicly available Chinese and English sources by this archive finds no publicly reported new feature film or series by him released after 2020^※; this hiatus itself mirrors in miniature the predicament many young Hong Kong directors face amid shifting industry conditions, and lacking further reliable sources, no speculation is offered here.

# Significance

Wong's case forms a deliberate contrast with the three "imported scholar-presidents" above: he is an alumnus trained from undergraduate level at CityU who made his name in the creative industries, representing the University's talent output in film and creative media, an area outside its traditional strengths. CityU alumni active in creative media and popular culture (see ./notable-alumni.md and ./alumni-in-culture-and-media.md) complement its mainstream image in engineering and business, forming the other face of the CityU profile of notable figures.

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# Four Paths in Comparison: Two Ways of "Building an Institution on People"

Reading the four biographies side by side reveals the two paths by which CityU, a young university (formally designated a university only in 1994), has "built itself on people": one is recruiting from outside scholars and administrators who already have international reputations; the other is cultivating its own people, then looking back once they have made their mark in the wider world.

A commonality between the two presidents is worth noting: both Chang and Kuo came from engineering backgrounds (the former biomedical engineering, the latter reliability engineering), and both turned to writing for a broad public after leaving office — one writing civilisational history, the other higher-education commentary. The engineering scholar "staking a claim in writing" is no isolated phenomenon among CityU's presidents. Zhang and Wong, meanwhile, represent the other side of CityU's talent narrative: one a serving scholar still proving himself through papers and citations, the other an alumnus who left CityU long ago to develop independently in the wider industry. Together, the four show that CityU's constellation of notable figures is not sustained by presidents alone — the international visibility of its scholars and the industry influence of its alumni are equally constitutive of this young university's identity.

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