CUHK students swept top awards in the 14th Challenge Cup held at Guangdong University of Technology, and won the Winners’ Cup, the second top prize of the competition. With overall outstanding performance, CUHK received the second top prize, Winners’ Cup, beating more than 300 participating universities and over 780 projects from mainland china, Hong Kong and Macau. CUHK was the only institution in Hong Kong to receive this highest award since the competition accepting participation of Hong Kong tertiary institutions in 1997.

As a bi-annual national competition, the Challenge Cup is known as the "Olympics" in promoting innovation in social science, science and technology for university students in China. In the past, CUHK had already won the Hong Kong and Macau Cup for 6 consecutive times. This year, Hong Kong teams joined the national competition to compete with other mainland university finalist for the first time. CUHK won the Winners’ Cup this year. The result is very encouraging.

Eight teams of CUHK students participated in the competition. To view the awarded engineering projects and awards, please go to www.cpr.cuhk.edu.hk/en/press_detail.php?id=2132

Prof. Sun Xiankai, Assistant Professor, Department of Electronic Engineering received the Early Career Award by Research Grants Council (RGC) in recognition of his excellent research performance. 

Applications for research project grants under the Early Career Scheme are assessed independently by international experts, with applicants required to be full-time academic staff members within the first three years of employment at a University Grants Committee (UGC) funded institution. Of the 151 funded projects, only 9 early-career scholars received Early Career Awards due to their “excellent” ratings with a full score of 5.0.  Prof. Sun scored a top rating with his funded project “Investigation of the force law of classical electrodynamics with nanoscale optomechanical systems”. 

The Early Career Scheme aims to nurture the development of promising research talents by supporting the research projects of junior scholars at the beginning of their academic career.  Each year the RGC would select up to 5% of the top junior scholars to receive the honorary title of Early Career Award.  In addition to the funding of research for undertaking independent research work, an honorary title will be awarded plus an additional amount of $100,000 per project will be provided to those awardees who have submitted a satisfactory Education Plan for undertaking educational activities.