Prof. Jonathan Choi Chung-hang from the Department of Electronic Engineering (Biomedical Engineering) received a Croucher Innovation Award 2016 in the amount of HK$ 5 million. He is the first ever recipient from CUHK since the inauguration of this award by the Croucher Foundation in 2012.  

Prof. Jonathan Choi Chung-hang specializes in the interactions of nanoparticles with the body across the length scales of organ, tissue, cell, and organelle. His mechanistic research will inform useful ‘design rules’ for building more potent therapeutic nanoparticles. He previously reported novel ‘bio-nano’ interactions between nanoparticles and the kidney (Choi CHJ et al. PNAS, 2011), which will aid the development of new delivery strategies to the kidney. With this award, he hopes to design nanoparticles for detecting kidney diseases in vivo. 

Prof. Choi joined CUHK in 2013 as an assistant professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering. As a core member of the Biomedical Engineering Programme, his research interests lie in drug delivery, ‘bio-nano’ interactions, bionanomaterials, and biological imaging. 

He remarked, “It is a humbling experience and my deepest honour to be bestowed with this prestigious award. Since biomedical engineering is an interdisciplinary programme, the Croucher Innovation Award will empower me to forge more fruitful research collaborations with the Faculties of Medicine and Science.” He also added, “As a native of Hong Kong, I also hope to inspire more young and talented Hong Kong students to pursue a career in science and engineering.”

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Prof. Choi completed his secondary school studies at Wah Yan College Hong Kong, scoring 10 distinctions in the HKCEE in 2000.  He later moved to the U.S. and obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering from Stanford University in 2005 and 2006, respectively. In 2011, he received his Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. For his dissertation, he established important design rules for delivering nanoparticles to the tumor and kidney mesangium in vivo. From 2011 to 2013, he worked as a Croucher postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, where he studied how bionanomaterials enter and subsequently traffic inside the cell.

About The Croucher Innovation Awards
The Croucher Innovation Awards aim to identify a small number of exceptionally talented scientists from all countries working at an internationally competitive level and to offer substantial support to these “rising stars” at a formative stage in their careers. This scheme is designed to enable recipients to pursue their own scientific, intellectual and professional inclinations, to advance their expertise, to engage in bold new work, and to contribute to the development of education and research in Hong Kong. A formal prize presentation ceremony will take place in April 2016.

Prof. Lyu Rung Tsong Michael from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has been elected Fellow by The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) - an authoritative international engineering organization - for his remarkable contributions to the theory and practice of software reliability engineering.  This year, 42 are named ACM Fellows worldwide and Dr. Lyu is the only one from Hong Kong.  ACM fellowship is the organization’s most prestigious membership grade which only the top 1% of its members fulfills the strict criteria to receive. 

Since the establishment of the ACM Fellows programme in 1993, only a few Hong Kong scholars have received the honor, all of them top computer scientists. With Dr. Lyu newly elected, the total number of ACM Fellows in CUHK has risen to 4.  The other three ACM Fellows are Prof. Benjamin Wah, CUHK Provost; Prof. Andrew Yao, CUHK Distinguished Professor-at-Large and winner of the prominent A.M. Turing Award; and Prof. John Lui, Associate Dean in Research, Faculty of Engineering, and the Choh-Ming Li Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at CUHK. 

“I am truly honored to have received this prestigious fellowship from ACM,” Dr. Lyu said. “Having worked in CUHK for almost 18 years, I am grateful for the support from my colleagues and the University.  In the years ahead, I will continue to advance software reliability engineering techniques for enabling correct functionality of the automatic systems in the daily life of our modern society.” 

Dr. Lyu is an international expert in the area of software reliability engineering and software fault tolerance.  His research interests lie in software engineering, dependable computing, distributed systems, cloud computing, services computing, big data analytics, and machine learning. He has participated in more than 30 industrial projects in these areas, and helped to develop many commercial systems and software tools.  In addition, Dr. Lyu has published over 480 refereed journal and conference papers in his research areas. He also co-edited two books on software reliability, which have received enthusiastic responses from both academia and industry. Dr. Lyu was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2004 and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2007. He was also named Croucher Senior Research Fellow in 2008 and IEEE Reliability Society Engineer of the Year in 2010.

About ACM

ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society uniting the world's computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.