CityU and Cornell’s Veterinary Collaboration — The “Lineage” and Curriculum Import Behind the JCC College of Veterinary Medicine

This is part of the CityU Wild History 09 Internationalisation module, and focuses on the pre-history, funding and faculty lineage of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) — that is, how the concept of “lineage” was concretely realised in money, people and bricks. Details of the Cornell curriculum blueprint, the dual RCVS + AVBC accreditation, and the first graduating class of 11 students have been fully covered in the companion piece global-partnerships-and-exchange-3.md; this piece complements rather than repeats that material. For CityU’s overall international network, see global-partnerships-and-exchange.md.

In a sentence: The Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences at City University of Hong Kong was founded as a department in 2014, launched its six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine in 2017, and was named after a HK$500 million donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club in 2018, with Cornell University as its strategic partner (from 2009). This piece investigates its pre-history, funding and faculty lineage, and does not recount the accreditation process.

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# How a veterinary school grew from nothing

Before 2014, Hong Kong had no veterinary school. Students who wanted to become vets had to study in the UK, Australia or the US and then return to Hong Kong to seek registration to practise. To create “Asia’s first internationally accredited veterinary programme” out of this void, CityU needed more than a curriculum outline — it simultaneously lacked money (for buildings and equipment), people (veterinary professors with clinical and research credentials) and an endorsement (a quality guarantee that the RCVS and AVBC would recognise). CityU went to the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the international veterinary community and Cornell University to borrow these three things. This piece dissects how those three “borrowings” were stitched together over more than a decade.

To grasp how total that void was, one must first see the old landscape. Before 2014, no tertiary institution in Hong Kong trained veterinarians; aspiring local students could only travel to the UK, Australia, New Zealand or the US, and then, armed with a foreign qualification, return to Hong Kong to apply for registration with the Veterinary Surgeons Board of Hong Kong (VSB). In other words, Hong Kong long relied on “importing” veterinary talent to fill gaps in local animal healthcare and public health, without a local training pipeline or its own veterinary education quality standards. What CityU had to fill was precisely this total absence of both talent and standards — which also explains why it had no choice but to import a ready-made international accreditation system: in the absence of any local precedent, a set of external standards recognised by the RCVS and the AVBC was the fastest route to enabling Hong Kong–trained vets to practise immediately upon graduation.

The companion piece explains “what the curriculum looks like and how accreditation was obtained”; this piece explains “where the College’s money came from, where its professors were recruited from, and which building houses its teaching”. The former is the finished product; the latter is the foundation.

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# Five milestones: from ambition to a publicly funded degree

The formation of CityU’s veterinary college was not a single ribbon-cutting but a phased institution-building process spanning more than a decade. Drawing on Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine’s global impact page^※ and a Wikipedia overview^※, it can be distilled into five key milestones:

The time lag between “self-financed” and “publicly funded” is worth noting: the first cohort admitted in 2017^※ studied on a self-financed basis, and it was not until 2019/20 that the degree was brought under UGC public subsidy. That is to say, during the early years when the College was most in need of money, it was kept afloat by self-financed tuition fees plus the Jockey Club donation; public funding only arrived later. This transition — private first, public later — is the most easily overlooked part of CityU’s veterinary education funding story, yet it most clearly illustrates how the school was built “from scratch”.

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# Where did the “Jockey Club” in the name come from? A HK$500 million naming donation

The words “Jockey Club” in the College’s full title are not a symbolic gesture but the result of a substantial donation. According to a Hong Kong Jockey Club press release dated 20 August 2018^※, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust donated HK$500 million to CityU to support the establishment of Hong Kong’s first Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine programme. In recognition of the donation, CityU renamed the college “Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences”, and held a naming ceremony on campus that day.

The donation was earmarked for specific purposes. According to the same press release, a key use was to support the construction of a purpose-built teaching and research building named the “Jockey Club One Health Tower”, which at the time was expected to be completed in 2022 and was planned to house departments including biomedical sciences, infectious diseases and public health. In other words, the Jockey Club’s HK$500 million was not merely a scholarship pool; it directly went into the physical skeleton of the College.

The rank of the ceremony’s attendees indirectly confirms the College’s weight in Hong Kong’s higher education landscape: the press release records the presence of the then Chief Executive, the then Secretary for Education, the then Chairman of the University Grants Committee, as well as CityU’s Council Chairman and then Vice-Chancellor and President. The then HKJC Chairman summed up a tripartite structure in his remarks: "the partnership between the College and Cornell University, together with support from the Hong Kong government and the UGC, will become an outstanding centre for veterinary medical education and research^※" (original Chinese: 「学院与康奈尔大学的合作，加上香港政府与教资会的支持，将会成为一所卓越的动物医学教育及研究中心」). In a single sentence he laid out the three resource streams — Cornell (academic) + government/UGC (public funds) + Jockey Club (philanthropic) — which is precisely the structure this piece sets out to dissect.

# The Jockey Club wasn’t the only donor: HK$100 million in 2015

To read “Jockey Club” as the entirety of the College’s funding would miss a much earlier donation. According to a CityU news item from 14 March 2015^※, philanthropists Dr Li Dak-sum and Mrs Yip Yio-chin donated HK$100 million to CityU to establish the “Li Dak Sum & Yip Yio Chin Development Fund for Veterinary Medicine”, intended to advance professional education and research in veterinary and life sciences, support collaborative curriculum development and faculty recruitment, and establish an animal health and food safety laboratory. This donation arrived three years before the Jockey Club’s naming donation, during the early phase of the department’s founding when seed funding was most needed.

It is intriguing to note one Cornellian who attended the 2015 fund-establishment ceremony — then Dean of Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, Professor Michael Kotlikoff. He stated at the ceremony that the mission of the two universities’ collaboration was to "train the next generation of clinicians and scientists to help meet the challenges of animal health and welfare in Asia^※" (original Chinese: 「培养下一代临床医生与科学家，帮助应对亚洲动物健康与福利的挑战」). Kotlikoff later rose to become Cornell’s Provost — the same Provost with whom a CityU delegation met during a 2024 visit to Cornell, as recounted in the companion piece. The trajectory of the same individual from “Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine” to “Provost of the University” spans nearly a decade at both ends of this collaboration, and serves as a footnote to the personnel continuity on the Cornell side of the “lineage”.

Funding lineage summary: The College’s start-up capital was pieced together from at least four forces — the 2015 Li Dak-sum & Yip Yio-chin HK$100 million development fund (seed), the 2018 Jockey Club HK$500 million naming donation (building + programme), UGC public funding for places from 2019/20 onwards, and earlier self-financed tuition fees. These four were staggered in time and each served its own function, running in parallel with the line of “Cornell providing the academic blueprint”.

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# Where did the professors come from? A faculty lineage from Sydney to Ithaca

One can throw money at a building, but veterinary professors are not a resource that can be conjured out of nothing by cash alone. The hardest part for a brand-new college is often recruiting, one by one, teaching and research staff who have clinical qualifications, are fit to teach, and can pass muster with international accreditation bodies. The faculty sources for CityU’s JCC can be roughly grouped into three streams, forming a personnel lineage with a strong whiff of “discipleship”:

The starting point of this lineage is, in fact, the founding dean’s own CV. According to a 2018 Cornell news item about hosting the delegation^※ and publicly available academic profiles, Founding Dean Professor Michael P. Reichel obtained his veterinary degree from Freie Universität Berlin; his career took him through New Zealand, the Falkland Islands, East Africa, Switzerland and Australia, spanning both government service and the private sector. Before coming to Hong Kong, his most recent role had been helping to build a new veterinary school in Adelaide, Australia, where he served as Associate Dean (Research) — a school that achieved AVBC accreditation in 2013. In other words, the person CityU hired to lead its own founding had just finished building an AVBC-accredited veterinary school. That “I’ve just done this once” experience was itself the most direct “lineage” available once CityU decided to pursue the AVBC accreditation pathway. The Founding Dean arrived with a blueprint for accreditation he had already run through, so the College’s first foundation was not laid on the shifting sands of pure theory.

Beyond the founding dean, what propped up clinical teaching was “the Sydney line”. According to a CityU JCC news item^※, upon joining CityU, Vanessa Barrs became a Chair Professor, Associate Dean and Director of Veterinary Affairs, with responsibility for “curriculum development and teaching programmes related to One Health”; Julia Beatty became a Chair Professor of Veterinary Medicine and Infectious Diseases, drawing on years of clinical teaching experience to help build the Department of Clinical Sciences. Both came from the University of Sydney and specialised in feline medicine, transplanting the teaching and research traditions of an established team wholesale into the new College.

Professor Barrs later succeeded as Dean — she is the Dean who spoke on behalf of JCC in the 2023 dual-accreditation announcement, as detailed in the companion piece. The personal trajectory from “Associate Dean who transferred from Sydney” to “the Dean who presided over accreditation” is itself a microcosm of how the College’s faculty grew from nothing to mature stewardship. As for the Cornell-side personnel input, it primarily filtered in through the 29 faculty members serving as joint PhD supervisors^※ and through doctoral students undertaking research residencies at Cornell — a research-level “lineage”, running in parallel with the recruitment of local clinical faculty as a separate transfusion channel.

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# Is CityU Cornell’s only child? Placing it within Cornell’s global map

Outsiders can easily imagine that CityU’s JCC is Cornell’s sole deep collaborative partner overseas. That is not the case. According to Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine’s global collaboration page^※, Cornell maintains multiple institutional-level veterinary partnerships worldwide; CityU is simply the one into which it has poured the deepest engagement. Placing the three principal partners side by side makes the uniqueness of the CityU collaboration clearer:

By contrast, the distinctiveness of CityU becomes clear: compared to the “exchange visits” with Obihiro in Japan or the “facility advisory” work with Tata in India, CityU is the only case where Cornell participated in the full process — from site planning right through to accompanying it on curriculum committees and joint doctoral training — an “institution-building” partnership. According to Cornell’s website, its joint PhD training with CityU covers four major fields: “comparative biomedical sciences, immunity and infectious disease, molecular and systems neuroscience, and public health and epidemiology^※”, with doctoral students able to spend up to a year in residence at a Cornell joint supervisor’s lab — a depth that neither the Obihiro nor the Tata partnership possesses.

This also answers a frequently asked question: CityU is not Cornell’s “only child”, but it is certainly the partner in Asia into which Cornell has invested most heavily and along the longest engagement chain. Placing the three cases next to each other precisely highlights that, in CityU’s case, “lineage” is not rhetoric but actual stewardship, from blueprints to the lecture podium.

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# Does it have its own building? From “borrowing Cornell’s facilities” to building its own

A veterinary school needs more than a curriculum and professors; students need animals, operating tables and diagnostic laboratories to train clinically. In JCC’s early days, the most immediate shortcoming was that local clinical facilities were still on the drawing board. Its solution was to “borrow first, build later”: early on, students were sent to Cornell to use existing facilities, while donations from the Jockey Club were used to build local hardware. This hardware lineage can be compared as follows:

According to Cornell’s October 2018 hosting news^※, when Founding Dean Professor Reichel and the then CityU Provost led a delegation to Ithaca, they inspected precisely the Cornell Hospital for Animals, the Animal Health Diagnostic Center, the Equine Park and simulation labs — the very facilities upon which CityU undergraduates’ summer training relied before CityU’s own facilities were completed. Cornell’s Associate Dean for International Programs and Public Health, in an interview, captured the educational logic behind this “borrowing”: "In an increasingly globalized world, we want our students to be truly prepared for problems and solutions on an international scale — collaborations like this are expanding that capability^※" (original Chinese: 「在日益全球化的世界里，我们希望学生真正为国际规模的问题与解决方案做好准备，这样的合作正是在扩展这种能力」).

The end point of this lineage was the College’s construction of a full set of local teaching and research facilities — the Lam Tsuen Animal Medical Teaching Farm in Tai Po provides scenarios with livestock and large animals, the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre and Diagnostic Laboratory handle clinical and diagnostic work, and the Jockey Club One Health Tower is the main building that pulls these dispersed elements together. At this point, “having classes using Cornell’s facilities” gradually transitioned to “having classes in one’s own building”, completing, alongside the previously described funding and faculty lineages, the closed loop from dependence to self-reliance.

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# “Curriculum import” meant importing governance, not just teaching materials

When people talk about the CityU-Cornell collaboration, they often reduce it to “copying a set of courses”. But from an institutional perspective, the crux of this collaboration was not “which subjects were imported”, but rather “a continuous governance relationship was imported”. Cornell did not simply sell a curriculum outline and then walk away; it sits long-term on CityU’s Admissions Committee and Curriculum Committee, participating in decision-making. According to Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine website^※, since 2009, Cornell’s substantive role has encompassed “strategic planning, development/design/operation of teaching and clinical facilities, recruitment of administrative leadership and faculty”, and specific participation in “admissions, curriculum committee and curriculum delivery”. This means the quality guarantee is not a one-time authorisation, but a form of shared governance embedded into the day-to-day running of the programme.

This model of “stewardship governance”, rather than a “buyout of courses”, is precisely the institutional prerequisite that enabled CityU to successfully navigate the dual RCVS and AVBC accreditation: what international accreditation bodies audit is never just a course list, but whether that course list can be stably and sustainably delivered. Cornell’s continued presence — through joint supervisors, a teaching innovation fund, and seats on the curriculum committee — provided CityU with exactly that endorsement of “sustainable delivery”. The dual-accreditation outcome that the companion piece details is institutionally founded on this long-term governance relationship — accreditation was the effect; stewardship governance was the cause.

This distinction between “buyout” and “stewardship” also explains why the collaboration has lasted more than fifteen years and keeps layering on at the postgraduate level: it was designed from the start not as a transaction, but as a long-term relationship written into committee charters.

# An academic skeleton built from four departments

When “lineage” is translated into organisational structure, one finds a College with full departmental architecture, not a single programme hitched to an existing department. According to the Wikipedia overview^※, the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences comprises four departments, each corresponding to a component of the Cornell curriculum blueprint:

The significance of this architecture is that JCC did not “outsource” veterinary education to Cornell; it built its own departments and recruited its own department heads, then allowed Cornell to participate in governance at the level of the admissions and curriculum committees. That the Department of Biomedical Sciences was reorganised from CityU’s existing Department of Biology and Chemistry also shows that the new College drew on CityU’s existing disciplinary foundations — it was not built entirely on a greenfield site. The four departments each connect to different segments of Cornell’s training map; this is how “curriculum import” was broken down and embedded at the organisational level.

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# How narrow is admission? A six-year bachelor’s degree with roughly 30 places a year

This College, into which hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars have been poured, which borrowed Cornell’s facilities and recruited professors from Sydney, admits only around 30 undergraduate students a year. According to a summary from an admissions advisory source^※, the six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM, JUPAS code JS1801) is taught wholly in English, with roughly 30 places each year, of which the non-local quota does not usually exceed 10. Because an interview is involved, competition is intense, and successful local applicants through the HKDSE generally score 30.5 points or above. As the programme is accredited by the RCVS and the AVBC, graduates can register directly with the Veterinary Surgeons Board of Hong Kong (VSB) without sitting an additional examination — this is the critical systemic difference that means Hong Kong students, who previously had to study overseas, can now stay in Hong Kong.

The above admission figures come from an unofficial admissions advice platform summary and are not official year-by-year announcements. Actual quotas and entry requirements should be checked against the CityU JCC admissions page^※ for the relevant year, as they may be adjusted annually. Since the BVM became UGC-funded from the 2019/20 academic year, local students pay fees at the standard rate for UGC-funded places.

Though the intake is small, the student body has become increasingly international. According to a CityU news item from 10 November 2025^※, that academic year’s BVM intake registered “record international enrolment”, with new students coming from Germany, Italy, South Africa, Jordan, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, mainland China (Shanghai) and Macau, among other places. One Jordanian student entered with a perfect International Baccalaureate score of 45, and one Hong Kong student was admitted with six HKDSE subjects at level 5**. Dean Professor Barrs said in the announcement that the College would "support them to make the most of their six-year journey at CityU, to grow with curiosity and empathy^※" (original Chinese: 「支持他们充分把握在城大的六年旅程，带着好奇与同理心成长」). The same news item also mentions that during their studies BVM students can go on overseas exchanges to institutions such as Cornell, Oxford, Cambridge, Toronto and Columbia — and Cornell’s place on that list is the most quotidian continuation of the “lineage” this piece has been describing.

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# The collaboration keeps layering: a new Master of Veterinary Medicine in 2026/27

This “lineage” did not conclude once the undergraduate programme reached its accreditation targets; on the contrary, it continues to add layers at the postgraduate level. According to a CityU announcement from December 2025^※, the College will launch a brand-new Master of Veterinary Medicine (MVetMed) programme in September 2026 — a one-year, full-time, English-taught programme focused on small animal medicine, aimed at graduates who already hold a veterinary qualification and wish to strengthen their clinical reasoning and evidence-based practice skills.

The curriculum continues the consistent JCC orientation: case-based learning, diagnostic reasoning, advanced imaging, epidemiology and a One Health approach, with animal welfare principles integrated into clinical decision-making. The announcement names Dean Professor Barrs’s “strategic partnership with Cornell University” as one of the foundations underpinning the development of the master’s programme. Programme Director Professor Elliott Chiu stated: “The MVetMed marks a significant advancement in postgraduate veterinary education in Hong Kong^※” (original Chinese: 「MVetMed 标志着香港研究生兽医教育的一次重要推进」). This master’s programme, launching in the 2026/27 academic year, extends the Cornell “lineage” from undergraduate institution-building to postgraduate clinical training — the newest layer in this collaboration for the coming decade.

Postgraduate-level international cooperation had, in fact, been under way well before the first BVM cohort graduated, and it was not limited to Cornell. According to a 2015 CityU news item^※, CityU and the University of Stirling in the UK jointly launched an MSc in Aquatic Production and Veterinary Health in 2016, with an intended intake of 30 students. This master’s programme corresponded to the “aquatic animal health” strand among the BVM’s four local themes — and runs in parallel to the Cornell-led mammalian clinical strand, showing that JCC’s “lineage” is not a single source but a multi-strand structure, with Cornell as the backbone and other international partners added according to disciplinary needs. From the 2016 aquatic production master’s to the 2026/27 small animal medicine master’s, this constitutes another line of collaborative layering, separate from the undergraduate programme and likewise steadily building.

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# Summary: the confluence of the three lineages of money, people and bricks

The companion piece answers the question: “What does CityU’s veterinary curriculum look like, and how did it achieve Asia’s first dual accreditation?” This piece answers the question of how it was built from a total void. When the three lineages are placed side by side, the term “lineage” takes on concrete referents:

1. The money lineage — starting with self-financed tuition, the 2015 Li Dak-sum & Yip Yio-chin HK$100 million development fund as seed, the 2018 Hong Kong Jockey Club HK$500 million naming donation poured into the main building, and UGC public funding for places from 2019/20 onwards; four funding streams staggered in time and each serving a distinct function.
2. The people lineage — Founding Dean Reichel arrived with the experience of having just built an AVBC-accredited veterinary school in Adelaide; Barrs, Beatty and others transferred en bloc from the University of Sydney in 2020, bringing a mature clinical team; 29 Cornell faculty members injected a research tradition as joint PhD supervisors.
3. The bricks lineage — initially, summer training was run using Cornell’s Hospital for Animals and Equine Park; in the mid-phase, an in-house diagnostic laboratory was built; in the mature phase, the Jockey Club One Health Tower, the Veterinary Medical Centre, the Lam Tsuen Teaching Farm were completed, achieving the transition from dependence to self-reliance.

These three lineages did not proceed in isolation: the Jockey Club’s money built the One Health Tower, giving the professors who transferred from Sydney a place to teach; the accreditation experience brought by the Founding Dean determined the standards according to which money and people had to be configured; and Cornell’s stewardship governance acted like an axle, threading money, people and bricks together onto a single set of international accreditation coordinates. Without any one of them, the other two could scarcely stand on their own. The three lineages converged along the main academic artery of Cornell, ultimately raising up a veterinary college capable of achieving dual accreditation by both the RCVS and the AVBC — and for that accreditation and the scene of the first graduating class, please turn to the companion piece global-partnerships-and-exchange-3.md. All figures and dates cited in this piece are accompanied by official sources; living individuals are recorded by name in a neutral academic context, and government officials are referred to by their titles at the time.

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# Further reading

• Cornell curriculum blueprint, RCVS + AVBC dual accreditation, first graduating class of 11 → global-partnerships-and-exchange-3.md
• CityU’s overall international cooperation network and the substance of “most international university” → global-partnerships-and-exchange.md
• CityU’s dual-degree programme with Columbia University (another flagship international partnership) → global-partnerships-and-exchange-2.md

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