The robotic platform of Professor Kwok Ka-wai, Professor at CUHK’s Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, provides new level of agility in non-invasive cancer surgery. He collaborated with Professor Jason Chan from the Faculty of Medicine to further develop the robotic system’s capacities to help with gastrointestinal surgeries.
For many years, Lu Yi-chun, a professor in CUHK’s Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, has toiled away on a solution that she hopes will enhance the safety of battery storage but still be cost-effective. Her work on polysulfide flow batteries has long garnered acclaim, and now she is taking her mission to the next level.
Robotic arms take digestive cancer operations to new heights in Professor Philip Chiu's innovation. The robotic arms, developed by his team jointly with CUHK’s Faculty of Engineering, mimic the dexterity of a surgeon’s hands – one arm holds tissue aside with its micro-grippers while the other wields micro-blades to excise with accuracy.
Don’t mistakenly regard this tiny wriggler as a blood worm – it is a revolutionary microrobot, crafted from a patient’s own blood cells and finer than a human hair, designed to navigate through the brain’s complex neural labyrinth with astonishing precision. Far from a sci-fi creature, CUHK’s innovative microrobots don’t just move – they slither, swim and crawl under magnetic control, hunting down cancer cells like guided missiles. Remotely steered by external magnetic fields, they deliver targeted therapy to brain tumours once considered untreatable, offering new hope where conventional methods fall short.
Picture a swarm of microscopic warriors – virus-like nanofibres – storming a breast tumour like a fortress, armed with oxygen and laser precision. Developed by a brilliant team at CUHK, these nanofibres can find breast tumours, produce oxygen, and help destroy cancer with light. In mouse studies, they made tumours shrink quickly, even in areas where current treatments often fail. This breakthrough could defy the limit of traditional therapies and spark a wildfire of hope for more targeted, less harmful cancer therapies.
An ancient society, by some measures, may have been more advanced in tattooing than we are today. A recent CUHK-led study has revealed incredibly intricate tattoos, with details as fine as 0.1-0.2 mm, on 1,200-year-old mummified remains from Peru’s Chancay culture. Using laser-stimulated fluorescence technology – a technique originally developed to study dinosaur fossils – the research illuminates the artistic sophistication of this ancient civilisation.
When you savor your favorite steak, you might not realise the hidden impact of your meal. According to CUHK, the rising meat consumption in mainland China is significantly worsening air pollution in less affluent regions. This is deepening the health and environmental divide between the rich and poor. So, your dietary choices are not just about taste—they’re influencing the air quality and lives of many others!
Tick-tock, tick-tock: the climate clock is making an alarming sound, counting down the amount of time we have left to save the earth. Scorching heat and potentially devastating flooding are both on the rise. Two recent CUHK studies have explored what we can do about that: while one is helping the authorities map floods and take contingency measures, the other predicts an ever hotter future, and suggests ways we can mitigate the heat’s most debilitating effects.
A multidisciplinary team led by gastroenterologists Professor Francis Chan Ka-leung and Professor Ng Siew-chien believe that the microbiome is the next frontier of medicine. For over a decade, the two clinician-scientists have been making cutting-edge innovations to identify and treat different diseases and translating them into clinical service and products for the benefit of the community.
As the digital world grows ever more information-hungry, Professor Tsang Hon-ki’s research on silicon photonics has proven to be a serendipitous career choice. His research team’s project is chosen for the Hong Kong government’s inaugural Research, Academic and Industry Sectors One-plus (RAISe+) Scheme, which helps universities transform and commercialise their research and development outcomes.
CUHK’s Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) is a trailblazer in bringing the worlds of medicine and engineering together. In collaboration with other world-leading institutes – plus visionary commercial partners – the MRC is further advancing minimally invasive, high precision surgical robotic technologies. It is also incubating affordable medical robots as pressure mounts for better patient care in hospitals in Hong Kong, the mainland and world.
Feeling down? Wondering if it is more than just a bad day? Imagine if technology could read your emotions and lend a helping hand. With shortage of psychiatrists challenging the global healthcare systems, it can be hard for depression sufferers to get diagnosed. CUHK researchers have harnessed the power of AI technology to develop two innovative tools that make diagnoses easier and earlier: by utilising a pioneering mobile app and looking into your eyes.
Most of us think of the Renaissance as something that happened in Europe. Not so, says Professor Stuart M. McManus from CUHK’s Department of History. His work, which has scooped him the Dan David Prize, the world’s leading history award, represents a highly ambitious attempt to set the record straight, yoking together different regions and eras to understand how cultures influence and reflect each other across the globe.
It’s not often that a new species of abelisaurid dinosaur gets discovered – the habitat of the famous Carnotaurus hasn’t yielded another abelisaurid since it was found 40 years ago – but that’s exactly what a CUHK-led team has just done. The extensive set of bones they found in South America come from Koleken inakayali, an agile apex predator that inhabited the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana 60-plus million years ago. The discovery sheds light on how predatory dinosaurs evolved and shows that more than one top predator lived side by side in Late Cretaceous ecosystems.
For the past 150 years, vertebrate palaeontologists have focused on the study of bones of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life. There are a lot of gaps to be filled in understanding prehistoric ecology, and the lack of data has given rise to speculations and myths. At CUHK, Professor Michael Pittman, a leading scientist in the field of vertebrate palaeontology, has been using innovative technology to revolutionise our understanding of pre-historic life.
Applied geographers use a variety of techniques to understand and explain human-environment relationships and solve real-world problems. The rapid development of geographic information systems (GIS) and other technologies in the past few decades has greatly expanded the reach of applied geography. Professor Kwan Mei-po, internationally recognised for her ground-breaking work that advanced GIS techniques, is dedicated to finding innovative ways to accurately assess people’s environmental exposures and the impact on their health, with an emphasis to capture individual experience.
Two CUHK professors are collaborating on technology solutions for Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong who suffer from dysarthria, which affects the articulation of sounds and words, and have since expanded their research to neurological diseases such as dementia. Their cross-disciplinary research combines multilingual speech processing, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and language learning.
The CUHK research group led by Professor Tony Mok Shu-kam has decoded the common mutated genes in lung cancer and developed targeted therapies that have successfully increased patients’ lifespans. These innovative therapies redefined global paradigms in lung cancer treatment, providing patients with fresh hope. Professor Mok has established himself as one of the leading oncologists of the world, with his work on targeted EGFR inhibitors marking a significant milestone in the use of immunotherapy.
Cancers of the stomach, colon and liver are among the top causes of death globally. CUHK’s world-leading multi-disciplinary research in gastroenterology and hepatology has helped save countless lives by revolutionising early detection of gastrointestinal cancers, fatty liver disease and liver cancer. Breakthroughs in this field by Professor Jun Yu, Director of both the Institute of Digestive Disease and the State Key Laboratory of Digestive Disease at CUHK, have already been translated into clinical applications across China and Southeast Asia.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an important framework for CUHK to organise its research enterprise. Life Sciences Professor Lam Hon-ming’s research into climate smart soybean cultivation on marginal land is impacting multiple SDGs – from ending hunger, to improving nutrition and food security, to halting and reversing climate change, restoring degraded land and promoting gender equality. As Director of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology at CUHK, he is also leading groundbreaking experiments in space.