Strategic Research Areas and Themes

Riding on our current research strengths, we aim to promote interdisciplinary research excellence that can deliver benefits, through creating, advancing and applying knowledge to improve the human condition, tackle grand challenges and fulfil societal needs on a local, national and global scale.

Based on the assessment of our world-leading research excellence, we have identified four major research areas that will address some of the most pressing issues facing humankind as our research priorities. These areas incorporate perspectives from the humanities and social science, with science and technology, to provide a comprehensive multidimensional approach to address multifaceted human and societal concerns. We further prioritize 16 cross-cutting themes in these four areas to focus our interdisciplinary research directions, providing investments to actuate emerging teams and to propel existing teams to reach the next level of excellence.

To facilitate the translation from research to application, the University will strengthen the interface between research and knowledge transfer, and encourage academia-industry/community partnerships. CUHK supports innovation and entrepreneurship by creating more opportunities to help researchers collaborate globally, get better access to industries beyond Hong Kong, together with collaborators internationally and in the Mainland, particularly the PRD region, and work closely with the Government and non-governmental sectors so that knowledge can benefit the society effectively and efficiently.