Prof. Jonathan Choi Chung-hang from the Department of Electronic Engineering (Biomedical Engineering) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) 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. Choi’s research interests lie in drug delivery, molecular diagnostics, “bio-nano” interactions, bionanomaterials, and biological imaging. Earlier this year, Prof. Choi co-invented a nanoparticle-based probe for detecting specific microRNA markers in living stem cells and published the findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. With this award, he will continue to engineer novel nanoparticle-based approaches for delivering drug molecules to challenging destinations inside the body. Specifically, he is working with CUHK physicians to build nanoparticles for tackling atherosclerosis and renal fibrosis.

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.

CUHK Faculty of Engineering press release: http://www.erg.cuhk.edu.hk/erg/node/735

CUHK Communications and Public Relations press release: http://www.cpr.cuhk.edu.hk/en/press_detail.php?id=2233

CUHK eMotion published the award news of Prof. Jonathan Choi, please click: http://www.cpr.cuhk.edu.hk/emotion/2016/6/indexe.html#a3

A former group member – Dr. Wang Chengliang (王成亮) is selected by Youth 1000-Talent Scheme. You may find more at http://www.1000plan.org/

It is a very competitive talent program for young scholars under 35 in the mainland.

Congratulations to Dr. Wang!

Prof. Ma’s research is in the areas of signal processing, communications, and optimization. His most notable contributions lie in the applications of optimization in these areas; principally to the topics of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transceiver designs and interference management.

The aforementioned paper is a widely recognized overview paper on semidefinite relaxation (SDR), a powerful optimization technique that has numerous applications in signal processing, communications, and beyond. The paper elegantly reviews the topic from theory to practice. It has attracted much interest from various communities, as evidenced by its very large number of citations.

Prof. Xu Jian-Bin is awarded the Research Excellence Award 2014-15 by The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In granting this Award, the University recognizes his remarkable accomplishment in research. The Award consists of an amount of HK$200,000 in the form of a research grant.

The Research Excellence Award is established by the Research Committee of the University with an aim to foster a long term and overall positive effect in encouraging research at the University which would eventually aggrandize the success rate of all research grant applications.

Congratulations!