Research Impact Fund Committee (2026-27)
| Title/Sphere of Interest | |
|---|---|
| Chairman | |
| Professor Raymond Yung* | Jeffrey B Halter M.D. Collegiate Professor of Geriatric Medicine, Associate Chair, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, U.S.A. Interests include rheumatology, arthritis, immunology and geriatrics |
| Members | |
| Professor Mike Ashfold* |
Emeritus Professor, University of Bristol, United Kingdom Interests include physical chemistry/chemical physics, molecular photochemistry, spectroscopy and reaction dynamics, plasmas, plasma diagnosis, chemical vapour deposition, laser ablation, thin film growth and characterisation |
| Professor Brian James Baer* |
Professor of Russian and Translation Studies, Department of Modern & Classical Language Studies, Kent State University, U.S.A. Interests include Russian, history of translation, sexuality, censorship, translation pedagogy and journal editorship |
| Professor Sarah Bell* |
Professor of Urban Resilience, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Australia Interests include urban resilience and innovation. Prof Bell's research addresses community engagement with infrastructure, drawing on the social sciences to better understand how people, technologies and nature interact to create resilient urban systems |
| Professor Francesca Beolchini* |
Full Professor in Theory for the Development of Chemical Processes, Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy Interests include hydrometallurgy/ biohydrometallurgy for metal recovery from solid residues, remediation of sediments contaminated with metals, sustainability assessment by LCA/LCC methodology |
| Professor Philippa Browning* |
Professor of Astrophysics, Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom Interests include solar physics, solar activity, solar and stellar flares, magnetically-confined fusion, plasma physics theory, magnetohydrodynamics |
| Professor Claudio Cantù* |
Professor in Cell and Molecular Biology, Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences (BKV), Linköping University, Sweden Interests include cell and molecular biology, genome regulation, Wnt/β-catenin signaling, transcriptional regulation, cancer initiation and progression |
| Professor Yihai Cao* |
Professor of Vascular Biology, Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden Interests include studying the fundamental mechanisms of angiogenesis, the key process of blood vessel formation, in various diseases, understanding molecular and functional mechanisms of angiogenesis in the onset and progression of most common and lethal human diseases such as cancer, metabolic disease, and cardiovascular disease |
| Professor Kin-shing Chan |
Emeritus Professor, Department of Chemistry, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Interests include carbon-hydrogen bond activation, catalytic carbon-carbon bond activation by transition metal complexes, transition metal-catalysed cross coupling, and green chemistry |
| Professor Wei Chen* |
Chair Professor, Department of Biology, Southern University of Science and Technology, China Interests include Systems biology, functional and medical genomics, bioinformatics, precision medicine and individualised therapy |
| Professor Siu-yin Cheung |
Emeritus Professor and Adjunct Professor, Department of Sport and Health Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Interests include sport and exercise psychology, sport and leisure management, aging, physical education, as well as teaching pedagogy and gymnastics |
| Professor George T C Chiu* |
Assistant Dean for Global Engineering Programs, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, U.S.A. Interests include mechatronics, dynamic systems and control, digital imaging and printing systems, functional printing and digital fabrication, robotics, perception-based engineering, human motor control, optimal and robust control |
| Professor Justin Jang Hann Chu* |
Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore Interests include virology, antivirals, hand, foot and mouth disease, dengue virus, chikungunya virus and vaccine |
| Professor Patricia Duff* |
Professor of Applied Linguistics and Distinguished University Scholar, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Canada Interests include bilingual/multilingual education, decolonising methodologies, English as an additional language, identity, language ideologies, language planning and policy, modern language and heritage language education, multiliteracy and multimodality |
| Professor Ronald Fischer* |
Professor, Institute D'OR for Research and Education, Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics Group, Brazil Interests include the interplay between culture, cognition and behavior |
| Professor Tim Forsyth* |
Professor of Environment and Development and Head of Department, Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom Interests include Southeast and South Asia (India; Indonesia; Laos; Myanmar; Nepal; Philippines; Thailand; Vietnam); climate change; environmental policy; social studies of science; social movements and environment; institution and governance |
| Professor Nasr M. Ghoniem* |
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A. Interests include damage and failure of materials in mechanical design; mechanics and physics of material defects (point defects, dislocations, voids and cracks); material degradation in severe environments (e.g. nuclear, fusion, rocket engines, etc.); plasma and laser processing; materials non-equilibrium, pattern formation and instability phenomena; radiation interaction with materials (neutrons, electrons, particles, laser & photons) |
| Professor Ajay Goel* |
Professor and Chair, Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics, Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope, U.S.A. Interests include gastrointestinal cancers, developing early-detection blood tests for colon, pancreatic and ovarian cancers, test for pancreatic cancer that can detect the disease earlier, genomic-based precision oncology |
| Professor Tilmann Harder* |
Professor for Marine Chemistry, Marine Chemistry, University of Bremen, Germany Interests include the marine chemical ecology, marine natural product chemistry, phytoplankton dynamics, dissolved organic matter, chromatography, mass spectrometry and NMR |
| Professor Brad Holschuh* |
Assistant Professor of Apparel Design, Department of Design, Housing and Apparel, College of Design, University of Minnesota, U.S.A. Interests include wearable technology, active materials, soft robotics, medical devices and bioastronautics |
| Professor Kevin Houser* |
Professor of Civil and Construction Engineering, College of Engineering, Oregon State University, U.S.A. Interests include architectural lighting & LED lighting, built environment, illuminating engineering, photonics, daylighting, visual perception, human health, and sustainability—all in support of high-performance buildings |
| Professor Woonghee Tim Huh* |
Professor and Chair, Operations and Logistics Division, Professor in Operations and Supply Chain Management, Department of Operations and Logistics, UBC Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada Interests include inventory control, supply chain management, capacity planning and operations research |
| Professor Eun-Ju Lee* |
Professor, College of Social Sciences, Department of Communication, Seoul National University, Korea Interests include social cognition and social influence in computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction |
| Professor Xitong Li* |
Professor of Information Technologies, Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, HEC Paris, France Interests include digital economy, social computing, computational social science, human-AI interaction economics of AI, New AI-supported applications and systems |
| Professor Wenbin Lin* |
James Franck Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago, U.S.A. Interests include sustainability and human health, metal-organic frameworks, catalysis, renewable energy, nanomedicine |
| Professor Jiangchuan Liu* |
Professor, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada Interests include networking and multimedia systems and applications; in particular, multimedia content processing and communications, internet architecture and protocols, wireless mobile networking, satellite networking, cloud and edge computing, online gaming and social networking, Internet of Things/RFID/backscatter, and energy-efficient computing and communication |
| Professor Zhilin Liu* |
Professor and Director of the Public Policy Institute, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China Interests include urban policy and governance, housing policy, urban social geography, sustainable development, new institutionalism theory |
| Professor Peter Lucas* |
Emeritus Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Department of Data Science, University of Twente, Netherlands Interests include AI, biomedical informatics, data science, Bayesian networks, model-based diagnosis, clinical decision-support systems |
| Professor Raymond A. Mar* |
Professor, Department of Psychology, York University, Canada Interests include imagining the self in fictional situations, influence of fictional others, and association between reading narrative fiction and social abilities, underlying mechanisms and real-world ramifications |
| Professor Maria Masucci* |
Professor, Senior, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden Interests include human tumour viruses, EBV, a lymphotropic herpes virus that is associated with lymphoid and epithelial cell malignancies including Burkitt's lymphoma (BL), nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), immunoblastic lymphoma (IL) and Hodgkin's disease (HD), studying the mechanism by which EBV proteins expressed in malignant cells modify the cellular environment and regulate the interaction of the infected cells with the host immune system |
| Professor Tracey Moore* |
Interim Vice President and Head of the Faculty of Health, The University of Sheffield, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Interests include recognising and responding to adult patient deterioration within an acute ward environment and the impact of track and trigger systems in detecting patients at risk of clinical deterioration |
| Professor Stephen T Newman* |
Professor of Innovative Manufacturing Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, United Kingdom Interests include machining science, computer aided process planning, machine tool metrology, CAD/CAM |
| Professor Duc Truong Pham* |
Chance Professor of Engineering, Head of School of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom Interests include rapid manufacturing, micro manufacturing, automation, robotics, IT and intelligent systems |
| Professor Jenny Phillimore* |
Professor of Migration and Superdiversity, Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom Interests include access to health, education, employment, training, and housing integration |
| Professor Hong Qian* |
Professor of Molecular Hematology, Department of Medicine, Huddinge, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden Interests include the role of the hematopoietic niche in bone marrow in myeloid leukemia using both mouse models and patient materials |
| Professor Timon Rabczuk* |
Chair of Computational Mechanics, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany Interests include constitutive modeling, material instabilities, fracture, strain localisation, numerical methods (extended finite element and mesfhree methods), isogeometric analysis, computational fluid-structure interaction, biomechanical engineering |
| Professor Krislert Samphantharak* |
Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Interim Director, International Studies Program, School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego, U.S.A. Interests include households and firms in emerging economies |
| Professor Feng Shao* |
Investigator and Deputy Director for Academic Affairs, National Institute of Biological Sciences, China Interests include studying molecular mechanisms of bacterial infection and host innate immunity defence |
| Professor Fabio Antonio Stella* |
Full Professor, Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy Interests include AI, machine learning, data and text mining, artificial neural networks, on-line optimisation algorithms, Bayesian networks, continuous time Bayesian networks, feedforward neural networks, on-line portfolio selection algorithms, probabilistic topic models |
| Professor Steve Waiching Sun* |
Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University, U.S.A. Interests include the mechanics and physics of geological and porous materials such as soil, rocks, concrete, and salt |
| Professor Dacheng Tao* |
Distinguished University Professor, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Interests include AI, including computer vision, data science, deep learning, image processing, machine learning, medical informatics, social media, and video surveillance |
| Professor Hanghang Tong* |
Associated Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A. Interests include large scale data mining and machine learning, especially for graph and multimedia data with applications to social networks analysis, healthcare, cyber-security and e-commerce |
| Professor Chao-Yang Wang* |
William E. Diefenderfer Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Energy and the Environment, The Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. Interests include multiphase transport, batteries and fuel cells. Conducts fundamental and applied research on fuel cells and advanced batteries for electric propulsion, stationary power generation and portable electronics |
| Professor Yonggang Wen* |
Professor and President’s Chair of Data Science, College of Computing & Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Interests include AI4Science, computational sustainability and distributed systems |
| Professor Tobias Wolbring* |
Chair of Empirical Economic Sociology, School of Business, Economics and Society, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany Interests include analytical sociology, economic sociology (with special focus on life satisfaction, Matthew effects, and social status), evaluation of research and teaching (in education and higher education), methods of social research (especially causal inference, DAGs, evaluations, experiments, and longitudinal data analysis), social inequality and discrimination (with special focus on physical characteristics, gender, and social status), and social norms/deviance |
| Professor Ke Wu* |
Full Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Montreal (Ecole Polytechnique), Canada Interests include substrate integrated circuits and systems, antenna arrays, field theory and joint field/circuit modelling, ultrafast interconnects, wireless power transmission and harvesting, microwave photonics, and megahertz–terahertz technologies and transceivers, including RFICs/monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) for multifunction wireless systems and biomedical applications |
| Professor Kui Wu* |
Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Canada Interests include network science, the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena. Analysing big data from a networked environment, Prof Wu’s current work applies theories and techniques of network science, including graph theory, machine learning, statistical inference, and data mining, to solve real-world problems |
| Professor Wei Wu* |
Director of Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria Interests include ground investigation; numerical simulation; geotechnical expertise; geotechnical design; geohazard |
| Professor Feng Xia* |
Professor of AI, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, Australia Interests include AI, graph learning, brain science, digital health, robotics and systems engineering |
| Professor Hongxi, Kevin, Xu* |
Distinguished Professor and Dean, School of Pharmacy, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, China Interests include traditional Chinese medicine, new drug discovery from natural resources, development of botanical dietary supplements from herbal medicines, finding natural lead compounds from medicinal plants and in developing new drug based on Chinese medicines against different disease targets such as cancer, HIV, HSV, HBV and metabolic diseases |
| Professor Sean Xin Xu* |
Starr Endowed Chair Professor, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Associate Dean, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, China Interests include digital transformation, analytics and AI, IT business value, IT strategy, IT governance, e-commerce |
| Professor Wenqing Xu* |
Director, National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai, School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, China Interests include structural and mechanistic studies of cell signalling |
| Professor Xiaohui Yu* |
Professor and the Graduate Program Director, School of Information Technology, York University,Canada Interests include information technologies, big data management and analytics, database systems, machine learning |
| Professor Qiang Zhang* |
Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University, China Interests include lithium-sulfur batteries, graphene, carbon nanatubes, electrocatalysis and lithium metal |
| Professor Chunfeng Zhao* |
Professor of Orthopedics and Biomedical Engineering, Division of Orthopedic Research, Department of Orthopedics Surgery, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, U.S.A. Interests include orthopedic biomechanics, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, connective tissues research, tendon and related soft tissue research, carpal tunnel syndrome, spine biomechanics, medical imaging development |
| Professor Jianhua Zhao* |
Chief Scientist, Professor, National Key Laboratory of Spintronics, Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University, China Interests include semiconductor spintronics, semiconductor low-dimensional quantum materials |
| Professor Ming Hao Zheng* |
Winthrop Professor of Orthopaedic Research, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Australia Interests include the field of regenerative medicine, in particular the translation of novel science into clinical practice, including the regeneration of tendon and cartilage using a patient’s own stem cells |
| Professor Yi Zhou* |
Professor, Key Laboratory of Condensed Matter Theory and Computation, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Interests include understanding and revealing novel quantum phenomena in many-particle systems |
| Professor Luo Zuo* |
Provost’s Chair Professor of Accounting and Finance, Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore Interests include financial accounting and corporate finance |
| Secretary | |
| Miss Elli Tai |
Assistant Secretary-General (Research)4, UGC |