Media

An HKU spokesperson responds to the media on the Financial Secretary’s Budget for 2019-20:

"The University of Hong Kong is delighted to see the government placing good emphasis and investing more on Innovation and Technology, and Research and Development with the dedication of $16 billion for R&D facilities at universities, on top of the $20 billion pledge into the Research Endowment Fund in the Policy Address. In HKU, we are well prepared to make further contribution to R&D, and look forward to the implementation of the funding.

We welcome the government’s continuous commitments to support university startups by providing an additional sum of no less than $800 million to support university institutions including Technology Transfer Offices and Technology Start-up Support Scheme for Universities (TSSSU) and doubling the maximum annual funding of the Technology Start-up Support Scheme for each university to $8 million, which not only would enable a closer university-industry partnership, but also help our technology transfer and commercialization to translate research outcomes into products, and provide opportunities to our academics, students and alumni to start their own business.

HKU has been collaborating with global partners on a wide range of initiatives including healthcare and artificial intelligence activities. Earlier on we signed an MoU with Harvard University to establish a Laboratory for Instrumentation for Precision Medicine, which opened up a new paradigm in healthcare leading to the customisation of healthcare, with medical decisions, treatments, practices, or products being tailored to individuals. With the government’s plan to pool together top-notch universities via the setting up of "Health@InnoHK" and "AIR@InnoHK", we look forward to deepening our collaboration with leading universities on such initiatives.

In terms of attracting and retaining talents, we are encouraged by the government’s proposal to increase monthly allowances for researchers in the Researcher Programme and Postdoctoral Hub Programme, which will help to further nurture local graduates to pursue a career in R&D.

Our academics have initiated a wide range of projects in the areas of smart city development, genome and healthcare research. With our solid research capability, we are well-prepared to contribute to the government’s healthcare and smart city initiatives, and welcome the setting up of the Hong Kong Genome Institute, as well as the Common Spatial Data Infrastructure (CSDI) for sharing geospatial information.

We also applaud the government’s effort in supporting athletes to pursue training and academic studies at the same time by increasing scholarship awards and grants, and will continue to support the cause under our sports scholarship programme.”