Further acclaim for Vice-Chancellor

CUHK Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming has earned an impressive array of prestigious honours. Adding to this remarkable list, he has recently been awarded the 2025 Richard B. Johnston, Jr, MD Prize in Developmental Biology in recognition of his groundbreaking discovery of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal blood and his pioneering advancements in non-invasive prenatal testing, a transformative procedure that has benefited more than 100 million women across over 100 countries.

The award was presented by March of Dimes, a leading organisation in the United States dedicated to maternal and infant health. Professor Lo becomes the first Chinese scientist to receive this prestigious award in the 29 years since the prize was established in 1996. It’s an extraordinary achievement given that eight previous recipients have gone on to become Nobel laureates.

CUHK Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming has been awarded the 2025 Richard B. Johnston, Jr., MD Prize in Developmental Biology by March of Dimes in the US.

Prestigious fellowship for computing experts

Professor Irwin King of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Professor Xing Guoliang of the Department of Information Engineering having been elected Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This distinction recognises Professor King’s work in machine learning for social computing and Professor Xing’s research in embedded AI and mobile computing systems.

Again, it’s a rare achievement: ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and presents the ACM A.M. Turing Award, frequently referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”. ACM Fellow is the association’s most prestigious member grade, recognising the top 1% of its members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology, and/or their outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Only 55 have been elected as Class of 2024 ACM Fellows, who will be formally recognised in June 2025 in San Francisco.

Professor Irwin King (left) and Professor Xing Guoliang (right)

Fintech leadership honoured

Fintech governance is a highly complex business. One of the key people untangling its complexities for the world is CUHK’s very own Professor Huang Hui Robin from the Faculty of Law. He was recently honoured with one of China’s top humanities and social sciences awards: a Second-class Award in Books and Theses of the 9th Round Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards (Humanities and Social Sciences) from the national Ministry of Education.

Professor Huang’s work decodes fintech regulation in China, setting it in an international context by comparing and contrasting it with other key jurisdictions, from the US to Singapore. He was also lauded for his pioneering 2021 book Fintech Regulation in China: Principles, Policies and Practices, the first English-language elucidation of Chinese fintech regulation.

Professor Huang Hui Robin

Inventions rewarded

Bright ideas from CUHK researchers reaped a bumper harvest of eight awards at the 15th International Invention Fair in the Middle East (IIFME), one of the region’s largest professional exhibitions for inventions and innovations. The winning inventions were the work of six different departments inside the Faculties of Medicine, Engineering and Science.

Four of them picked up highly sought-after Gold Medals with the Congratulations of the Jury – inventions that fight gastrointestinal cancer, promote children’s digestive health, boost diagnosis of genetic diseases and improve data collection by unmanned aerial systems, better known as drones – while two others collected Gold Medals. Two of these inventions were also given the special World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) National Award for Inventors and the Special Prize Awarded by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

CUHK’s innovation projects have won eight awards at the 15th International Invention Fair in the Middle East (IIFME).

Innovation leadership confirmed

There was even better news on the invention front at the 50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva, one of the biggest such event globally and the Middle East fair’s senior partner, where CUHK picked up a monumental 34 awards, its biggest ever haul.

The winning projects come from the Faculties of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Social Sciences. They included seven Gold Medals with Congratulations of the Jury, eight Gold Medals, 11 Silver Medals and seven Bronze Medals. The seven winners of the top award included a battery-free keyboard, leukaemia-fighting antibodies, a magnetic micro-robotic platform to treat aneurysms, a polymer-free sunblocker, multi-stress-tolerant soybeans, power-efficient transparent electrodes and a novel microbiome-based solution to enhance mental and digestive wellness of children. One of the gold-medal innovations – AI based Automatic Retinal Image Analysis (ARIA) to Detect Schizophrenia Risk – also netted the Thailand Award for the Best International Invention & Innovation, a special prize from the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

CUHK has won 34 awards at the 50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva, its biggest ever haul at this prestigious event.

Climbing the charts

Spend any time at CUHK, and it’s clear that you’re at a world-leading university. It’s nice, though, to have that fact officially recognised – something that happened in extremely gratifying style recently, when the University scooped ninth place in the world-renowned Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings 2025. This one-spot rise reaffirms the University’s position among the continent’s top 10 elite institutions for no fewer than eight consecutive years, reflecting its unwavering commitment to academic excellence and innovation.