Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) and the Division of Public Policy

HKUST's academic map is anchored by its four Schools – Science, Engineering, Business and Management, and Humanities and Social Science. But there is a fifth, increasingly important piece: the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS). It exists precisely to host cross-boundary fields that "belong to no single School" – environment and sustainability, public policy, technology and management, and more. This article traces AIS's origins and positioning, complementing Overview of the Schools^※ and The Four-Year Curriculum Reform and the Common Core^※.

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# I. From "Office" to "Academy": Fifteen Years in the Making

AIS was not always an academy; it has a backstory stretching back fifteen years. According to HKUST materials, its predecessor was the Interdisciplinary Programs Office (IPO), established in 2008 and the first academic unit in Hong Kong to offer multi-disciplinary study experiences^※. IPO's flagship offering was the Individualized Interdisciplinary Major, which HKUST describes as the first customised degree programme in Greater China to let students assemble courses from different departments – even different universities – on their own^※. In other words, long before "interdisciplinarity" became a buzzword in higher education, HKUST was already doing it with a modest office.

The real institutional leap came in 2023. In July 2023, the IPO was renamed and elevated to the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies, reflecting its school-level scale, its evolving role in interdisciplinary education and research, and its new standing as a "special academic zone"^※. The upgrade dovetails with the entry for 2023 in the university history timeline^※, which records the official establishment of the Academy. The rise from "office" to "academy" marks HKUST's formal elevation of interdisciplinarity from an auxiliary course-coordination function into an independent academic force standing alongside the four Schools.

Nor was the upgrade announced as a purely administrative matter; it was framed at the level of university strategy. According to the official announcement, then Vice-Chancellor and President Nancy Ip said that 「跨学科方法在教育与科研中日益重要，传统的单一学科已不足以应对人口老龄化、气候变化等紧迫的全球议题」^※ ("interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly important in education and research, and traditional single disciplines are no longer sufficient to address pressing global issues such as population ageing and climate change"); then Chief Vice-President Guo Yike stressed that AIS would operate with "flexibility and agility", including recruiting faculty directly in emerging fields. The announcement also named three nascent directions the University held in high regard – Art Tech, Biodesign and Interdisciplinary Scientific Computing – placing them alongside the established areas of environment and sustainability, public policy, and integrative systems and design as priorities for expansion.

The "special academic zone" label is especially telling: it means AIS has been granted a degree of institutional flexibility to incubate new cross-disciplinary programmes and research directions beyond the boundaries of traditional Schools. This fits with HKUST's overall style of "creating within constraints", and it echoes the role of the Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study^※ as an interdisciplinary hub. To locate AIS within the wider landscape of the four Schools, compare the Overview of the Schools^※ and the Complete List of Departments^※, which disentangles the three-tier structure of "departments / divisions / centres".

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# II. Three Roles: Education Hub, Incubator, Research Powerhouse

According to HKUST materials, AIS plays three roles:

1. Education hub – nurturing a new generation of professionals able to work across disciplinary boundaries^※;
2. Incubator – supporting the development of new interdisciplinary programmes^※;
3. Research powerhouse – research strength in environment, sustainability, public policy and emerging interdisciplinary fields^※.

These three roles feed into one another: as incubator it grows new programmes; as education hub it delivers those programmes to students; as research powerhouse it produces scholarship at the frontier of cross-disciplinary fields. This closed loop of "incubate – educate – research" is what sets AIS apart from a conventional school.

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# III. Five Divisions: The Internal Map of AIS

One common misconception: AIS is not a loose platform that merely coordinates courses. It has real internal structure in the form of "Divisions". As of mid-2026, according to the HKUST website, AIS comprises five divisions: Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC), Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas (EMIA), Environment & Sustainability (ENVR), Integrative Systems and Design (ISD), and Public Policy (PPOL)^※, plus cross-divisional units such as the Technology & Management Dual Degree Program (T&M-DDP) and the University Common Core. The five divisions were not born simultaneously; they grew in waves over nearly two decades.

According to HKUST's Fast Facts, the five divisions were established in phases between 2008 and 2024^※. Read the table and AIS's logic of growth becomes clear: it first established divisions in environment (2017) and public policy (2021) – fields with clear social demand and an inherently cross-disciplinary character – then elevated the whole to academy level in 2023, and finally added the Art Tech piece of the puzzle, arts and machine creativity, in 2024. The sections that follow take each direction in turn.

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# IV. The Programme Landscape: From 11 Programmes in 2023 to Today's Matrix

When AIS was first established, it offered, according to HKUST materials, 4 undergraduate and 7 postgraduate programmes spanning technology and management, environment and sustainability, and public policy, all with a strong interdisciplinary component^※. The common thread is a rejection of single-discipline training frameworks; each programme weaves technology, management, policy and environmental dimensions into a single curriculum – a response to the fact that real-world problems rarely respect disciplinary lines.

But that "4 undergraduate, 7 postgraduate" tally dates from 2023. With AMC joining and the Major+X extended-major framework rolling out, AIS's programme matrix has since thickened considerably. According to HKUST's Fast Facts, the flagship programmes today look roughly like this (undergraduate): the Technology & Management Dual Degree Program (T&M-DDP), BSc in Environmental Management & Technology, BSc in Sustainable & Green Finance, BSc in Innovation, Design & Technology, the Individualized Interdisciplinary Major (BSc), plus two extended majors hosted on the AIS platform – the extended major in AI and the extended major in Digital Media and Creative Arts (Major+DMCA). At postgraduate level, the list runs from Atmospheric Environmental Science and Environmental Science, Policy and Management to the Master of Public Policy, Master of Public Management, MSc in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship, and, under AMC, a Master of Arts in Arts and Machine Creativity. For the full programme list and application codes, see Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programme Catalogue^※.

For instance, programmes in the environment and sustainability direction (such as the research postgraduate track in environmental science, policy and management, see MPhil-PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management^※) fuse natural science, social science and policy analysis – which creates a direct teaching-research counterpart to HKUST's strong showing in SDG-related rankings (see Impact Rankings and the SDGs^※). On how these programmes fit into the four-year curriculum and the Common Core, see The Four-Year Curriculum Reform and the Common Core^※.

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# V. ISD and EMIA: The Twin-Track Incubator

Two divisions inside AIS perform similar functions yet occupy deliberately different niches, and they merit reading side by side. The Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD) has a mature undergraduate programme, the BSc in Innovation, Design and Technology, which uses project-based, hands-on learning to cultivate "generalist" engineers who cross the boundary between engineering and design. According to HKUST's Fast Facts, ISD is mid-sized within AIS, with about 33 regular faculty^※, and also offers postgraduate exits including an MPhil in Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship and an MSc in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship.

Next door, the Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas (EMIA) operates at an earlier stage: it exists to incubate emerging cross-disciplinary fields not yet crystallised into independent departments, and it carries a primarily postgraduate-level institutional role. EMIA's signature product is the Individualized Interdisciplinary Program (IIP), a PhD track co-administered with AIS: applicants must assemble a supervisory team drawn from at least two research areas, and graduates receive highly customised degree titles such as "PhD in IIP (Bionics Engineering)" (for curriculum details, see The Four-Year Curriculum Reform and the Common Core^※). The IIP lineage is the direct descendant of the old IPO's Individualized Interdisciplinary Major – extended from the undergraduate into the doctoral sphere. According to HKUST's Fast Facts, roughly 300 students^※ are enrolled in individualised interdisciplinary programmes under EMIA, making it the largest body of research students in AIS – clear evidence that "letting students assemble their own disciplines" is no niche experiment at HKUST.

The coexistence of EMIA and ISD sketches out a fascinating "twin-track incubator" structure inside AIS: ISD faces undergraduates, graduating "generalist" engineers through mature, project-based programmes; EMIA faces postgraduates, supporting as-yet-unnamed frontier cross-disciplinary research through a flexible supervisory-team mechanism. Together they cover the full spectrum of interdisciplinary talent development, from undergraduate to doctoral. Notably, the emerging directions the University singled out – Art Tech, Biodesign – are precisely the kind of fields that incubate on platforms like EMIA before maturing into full divisions; AMC's establishment as a division in 2024 is a textbook case of that incubation logic completing one full cycle.

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# VI. Division of Environment & Sustainability (ENVR): The Largest in AIS

By faculty numbers, the "number one division" in AIS is not the best-known name, Public Policy, but the Division of Environment & Sustainability (ENVR). According to HKUST's Fast Facts, ENVR has about 48 regular faculty, making it the largest of the five divisions^※ – nearly six times the size of AMC (about 8). The scale is no accident: ENVR was established in April 2017, one of the earlier independent units in AIS's lineage, and had already built up a substantial teaching and research base before the academy-level upgrade.

ENVR's programme portfolio spans all three levels – undergraduate, master's and doctoral. At undergraduate level it offers the BSc in Environmental Management & Technology and what HKUST calls Hong Kong's first BSc in Sustainable & Green Finance^※. At postgraduate level there are Atmospheric Environmental Science, an MPhil/PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management (see MPhil-PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management^※) and an MSc in Environmental Science, Management and Sustainability. Placing something as commercially tinged as "green finance" inside an environmental division is itself a footnote to AIS's cross-disciplinary logic: climate is at once a scientific question, a capital question and a policy question. ENVR's research strength maps directly onto HKUST's long-standing performance in international rankings related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); for the numbers, see Impact Rankings and the SDGs^※.

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# VII. Division of Public Policy (PPOL) and the Institute for Public Policy (IPP)

Within AIS's terrain, public policy is a strategic direction the University has cultivated with particular care. The Division of Public Policy (PPOL) was established in July 2021 and, according to HKUST materials, sits alongside the Institute for Public Policy (IPP), the two jointly working to develop public policy as an emerging strategic area^※, delivering rigorous policy research training – through close interdisciplinary collaboration – in environmental/social/economic policy and in innovation and technology policy. According to HKUST's Fast Facts, PPOL has about 24 regular faculty^※ and offers a Master of Public Policy, a Master of Public Management, and MPhil/PhD in Public Policy; the two taught master's programmes together enrol close to 300 students, making PPOL an important outlet for working professionals and international students (see the PPOL website^※ for programme details).

A university best known for technology investing heavily in public policy may look like a left-field move, but there is an internal logic: technological innovation (AI, biotechnology, climate technology) increasingly generates profound policy and governance challenges, and HKUST happens to possess both technical understanding and policy research capacity. Making "innovation and technology policy" a central strand of public policy is precisely HKUST's distinctive positioning – "understanding policy through technology, guiding technology through policy."

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# VIII. Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC): AIS's Fifth Division

If environment and public policy represent the "first half" of AIS, then the newly created Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) is its bet for the next decade – the "second half". According to an official AIS announcement, AMC was established on 1 July 2024 as the fifth division of AIS, with Professor Fu Hongbo as Acting Head^※, positioned as an interdisciplinary academic unit where technology, arts and humanities converge to spark creativity and innovation. This is the very "Art Tech" direction named in the 2023 elevation announcement, now grown from an incubating concept into a full division.

According to the same announcement, AMC focuses on four areas: machine creativity, machine-assisted art practice (spanning visual, sound, performance, installation and moving-image art), arts management (management, legal and business issues related to AI art and NFTs), and critical studies of art and machine creativity^※. In terms of programmes, AMC is planning four postgraduate degrees – taught MA and MFA, plus research MPhil and PhD – some of which are pending Senate approval. According to an HKUST press release, AMC is also in talks with more than ten local and global industry and academic partners, including Huawei, Sony Entertainment, Tencent, Bard College, the Beijing Film Academy, the Central Conservatory of Music, the Royal College of Art and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. For a university built on engineering, putting an "MFA" into its degree list is the most direct illustration of AIS's "special academic zone" flexibility. The undergraduate exits AMC draws on, such as the extended major in Digital Media and Creative Arts (Major+DMCA), are listed in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programme Catalogue^※.

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# IX. AIS in Numbers: Scale and Structure

Setting narrative aside, a few figures may give a more direct sense of where AIS stands. According to HKUST's Fast Facts, AIS has about 143 faculty members in total (115 regular and 28 visiting/adjunct), with roughly 1,913 undergraduate and 1,102 postgraduate students^※. Within the university as a whole (around 20,000 students and close to 1,000 regular faculty; see Overview of the Schools^※) that is modest in size, but the structure is revealing.

The most striking number in this table is the ~1,271 undergraduates enrolled in the extended major in AI^※ – a single programme stream that accounts for two-thirds of AIS's undergraduates. It shows that AIS's real influence lies not only in its exotic custom-made degrees, but in its role as a platform for "extended majors" that graft horizontal capabilities like AI onto students' primary majors across the university. In other words, many HKUST undergraduates are "in AIS without knowing it": their home major sits in another School, yet through the Major+X framework they complete a full suite of AI training on AIS's books.

On the postgraduate side, the structure tells a different story. According to the same Fast Facts, AIS's postgraduate population is split almost exactly in half between research students (~532) and taught students (~570). That ratio is unusual inside HKUST: in the science- and engineering-led Schools, research students overwhelmingly dominate, whereas at AIS taught students account for nearly half – precisely because directions like public policy, environmental management, and technology leadership and entrepreneurship cater to working professionals and international students who need a "practical, employable" exit such as a taught master's. The near-balance between research and taught is the direct demographic projection of AIS's dual identity – "frontier research in one hand, professional training in the other" – and it matches its self-declared triple role of "education hub + incubator + research powerhouse."

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# X. The Technology & Management Dual Degree (T&M-DDP): The Hardest Door to Get Through at AIS

Among AIS's many programmes, the Technology & Management Dual Degree Program (T&M-DDP) is unquestionably the flagship when it comes to admissions thresholds. According to HKUST admissions materials, it is Hong Kong's first programme of its kind, letting high-achieving students earn two internationally recognised degrees in five years – a BEng or BSc, plus a BBA^※. According to HKUST's Fast Facts, the programme enrols about 219 undergraduates – the largest "narrow-gate" bespoke programme in AIS (as distinct from the university-wide extended majors).

What makes T&M-DDP distinctive is that it is not a "do engineering first, bolt on business later" patchwork, but a fully integrated curriculum: each year, students read engineering/science and business courses side by side, supplemented by mathematics, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities, and bilingual business communication training in Chinese and English. On the technical side, majors span aerospace engineering, bioengineering, computer science, decision analytics, mechanical engineering and even integrative systems and design; on the business side, options include economics, finance, marketing and global business management. This "walk on two legs" design is the most concentrated expression of AIS's belief that "people who understand technology should also understand business", and it echoes other cross-business programmes such as RMBI (Risk Management and Business Intelligence) listed in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programme Catalogue^※.

The same technology-plus-management compound training shows up in where graduates go. According to figures published by the T&M programme, its graduates spread remarkably widely: banking and finance ~25%, engineering ~22%, consulting ~15%, further study ~14%, business management ~11%, IT ~10%, entrepreneurship ~3%^※. Finance and engineering are nearly level, with a further tenth-plus each flowing into consulting and further study – a spread that says "employable in almost any sector, beholden to none". To a degree, that is precisely the point of the dual degree: not locking students into a single career track, but giving them a passport that switches freely between the technical and the commercial.

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# XI. General Education and the Experimental Field: Major+X, UxOP and Three Emerging Directions

AIS's ambitions extend well beyond the degrees of its own divisions. According to the 2023 elevation announcement, it was also given two university-wide functions that reach into every undergraduate's curriculum.

The first is the Major+X extended major framework. According to HKUST materials, the framework was launched in 2021 and allows undergraduates to layer an emerging field on top of a traditional major^※; two options now exist – Artificial Intelligence and Digital Media and Creative Arts (DMCA) – with expansion planned. The ~1,271 AI extended-major students mentioned earlier are the scale proof of this framework's reach: it means interdisciplinarity is no longer the preserve of a few students on custom degrees, but a layer of capability within reach of every undergraduate at the University.

The second is the upgrading of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) into UxOP. According to the elevation announcement, UxOP lets students apply their knowledge and abilities through experimental research, teaching, internships and global-issues research, and communicate with people from different disciplinary backgrounds^※; AIS also plans to restructure the University Common Core – the general education component – so that interdisciplinary perspectives are woven more deeply into the undergraduate learning pathway.

As for the research frontier, the elevation announcement named three emerging directions AIS is prioritising for incubation, which reveal a good deal about its sense of direction: Biodesign, which combines engineering and biology to develop new medical devices, therapies and diagnostic tools^※; Interdisciplinary Scientific Computing, developing advanced algorithms and software systems applicable to physics, chemistry and environmental science; and Art Tech, which has already grown into its own division. One medicine, one computation, one art – together they span the main disciplinary fault lines HKUST wants to bridge. This is the "special academic zone" flexibility put to work precisely where it counts.

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# XII. A String of "Hong Kong Firsts": Another Way to Read AIS

Lay AIS's various threads side by side and one keyword recurs: "first". This is partly HKUST's habitual self-narrative, but it is also a useful key to AIS's strategic intent: it prefers to enter cross-disciplinary spaces that no one in Hong Kong, or even Greater China, has yet occupied.

According to HKUST's various pages, the list of "firsts" includes at least the following: its predecessor IPO was Hong Kong's first academic unit to offer multi-disciplinary study experiences^※; its Individualized Interdisciplinary Major was the first customised degree in Greater China to let students freely combine courses from different departments and even different universities; the Technology & Management Dual Degree is Hong Kong's first five-year dual degree programme^※; the BSc in Sustainable & Green Finance is described by HKUST as Hong Kong's first; and the 2024 Division of Arts and Machine Creativity is officially described as Hong Kong's first academic division integrating art and machine creativity (see the AMC establishment announcement^※).

These "firsts" naturally carry a promotional tinge; one need not take every "first" at face value. But read as a series, they reveal AIS's consistent play: rather than competing head-on with the four Schools in mature disciplines, it deliberately places its bets in the blank spaces between disciplines – between environment and finance, between technology and management, between art and algorithms. This strategy of "filling gaps" rather than "vying for turf" is precisely why AIS needed a "special academic zone" identity, and why it could grow from an office into a five-division academy in just a few years. For how this play has registered in international rankings and reputation, compare the Overview of the Schools^※ and Impact Rankings and the SDGs^※.

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# XIII. In Brief: The "Fifth Piece of the Puzzle" in HKUST's Academic Map

Placed within the HKUST narrative, AIS matters on three counts:

1. Institutionalised interdisciplinarity. The elevation from IPO to AIS transformed interdisciplinarity from an auxiliary function into a formal school-level structure – a significant evolution of the University's academic architecture.
2. Responding to real problems. Problems in environment, sustainability and public policy are inherently "undisciplinary"; AIS lets HKUST address these real-world challenges across boundaries.
3. The intersection of technology and policy. The establishment of the Division of Public Policy embodies HKUST's distinctive "understanding policy through technology" positioning – a notably forward-looking stroke in its academic map.

Beyond the four Schools of Science, Engineering, Business and Management, and Humanities and Social Science, AIS constitutes the "fifth piece of the puzzle" – a piece whose very purpose is to connect the other four.

It is also a piece still rapidly changing shape. From a small office in 2008, to an environment division in 2017, public policy in 2021, the academy-level elevation in 2023, and arts and machine creativity in 2024, AIS has grown a new piece every two or three years; and the AI extended major's absorption of more than a thousand undergraduates in just a few years shows its boundaries still expanding across the university. As incubating directions such as Biodesign and Interdisciplinary Scientific Computing mature, it is worth watching whether AIS will spin out further divisions – or even feed new cross-disciplinary departments back into the four Schools. For a young university still building its medical school and continually redrawing its academic map (see Overview of the Schools^※), this "connective" piece of the puzzle is likely to remain the most active, and the hardest to pin down in a single sentence.

Note: The timelines (IPO 2008, AIS elevation July 2023, AMC establishment July 2024), faculty and student numbers (about 143 faculty, ~1,913 undergraduates, ~1,102 postgraduates), and programme counts cited in this article are as stated in the source pages and are time-sensitive; AIS's divisions, programmes and scale are continually evolving. Please refer to the latest official HKUST announcements before citing.

# Further Reading

• Overview of the Schools^※ – where AIS sits in the coordinates of the four Schools
• Complete List of Departments^※ – disentangling the three-tier "department / division / centre" structure
• Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programme Catalogue^※ – ISD/T&M/AMC/green finance programmes and application codes
• The Four-Year Curriculum Reform and the Common Core^※ – how AIS programmes fit into the academic structure
• Impact Rankings and the SDGs^※ – how ENVR's research matches sustainability rankings

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