With the coronavirus outbreak still ongoing, HKU has decided to teach online for the month of March. This has meant that all teaching staff are working hard to convert their courses to online mode, and that all practical teaching will now have to be delivered in a concentrated five-week period starting 30th March. This has…
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Chinese New Year was quite early in the year but we are now well into the Year of the Rat. Unfortunately we are still looking at the coronavirus outbreak in Mainland China, with an increasing (but still low) number of cases in Hong Kong. This has meant that we have taken teaching online again for…
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Hong Kong is swept up into the ongoing crisis that is the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic. With 14,500 cases worldwide and over 300 deaths it is very serious, but so far in Hong Kong there have been just 14 cases. We have just one week of semester done, but we have decided to move to online…
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This was the first week of the new semester crammed in before Chinese New Year. We saw a resurgence in the protestor activity with new graffiti and the rebuilding on the Lennon Wall. But the main news has been the building epidemic of the Wuhan coronavirus which has now appeared in Hong Kong with suspected…
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This week has been the last one before the start of a new semester. I have to admit to being nervous about how this one might work out. I held a short briefing session for staff to allow discussion about how people were feeling before stepping into the lecture theatre next week. At least after…
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After a short break over Christmas I returned just after New Year. My first significant activity this year was a four day trip to Palawan in the Philippines. With a small group of ecologists I visited a CERS site to determine whether we could make use of this location for teaching or research purposes. We…
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I rather enjoy the annual Faculty Retreat. It is one of few opportunities for the faculty to get together en masse and to consider what it is trying to achieve together. This time we went to Sha Tin, and about two-thirds of the faculty turned up.
Rather sadly, due to concerns about the current unrest in Hong Kong we had to cancel our physical congregation this year, but today we held a virtual one to ensure that our 2018/19 graduands can graduate.
If you have been following the news from Hong Kong at all you will know that the protest movement has come to the university campuses. HKU was the site of some problems and some of us spent a long week trying to talk to protesting students and attempting to de-escalate the situation. In the end…
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The Faculty had three of its young stars recognised as Excellent Young Scientists by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. This is a major achievement for them and the Faculty. Dr Li Xiang David from the Department of Chemistry, Dr Wu Jin from the School of Biological Sciences and Dr Zhang Binzheng from the…
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