Honorary Degrees, Honorary Fellowships & Visiting Professorships

Each year during its Congregation, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) confers Honorary Doctoral Degrees and Honorary Fellowships. Honorary doctorates are granted to international figures who have achieved distinction in academia, science and technology, business, culture, or public service; honorary fellowships are more often awarded to individuals who have contributed directly to the University’s development and to Hong Kong society. This article compiles a verifiable roster from recent years (2020–2025) and traces the mechanism behind these accolades, along with the network of Nobel and Fields laureates gathered by HKUST’s Institute for Advanced Study.

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# 1. How Do the Honorary Degrees and Fellowships Work?

In a nutshell: Honorary doctorates recognise international academic and societal achievement; honorary fellowships spotlight direct contributions to the University and Hong Kong. The two are nominated through separate channels and conferred at separate ceremonies, forming two parallel systems of recognition.

• Honorary Doctorates (honoris causa): The Latin phrase means "for the sake of honour"—no coursework or examination is involved; the degree acknowledges achievement itself. HKUST awards them by field, most commonly as honorary doctorates in Engineering, Science, Humanities, Social Science, Business Administration, or Law. At a single ceremony, a physicist, an entrepreneur, and a filmmaker may share the stage; the degree category is simply the marker of their respective fields of contribution.
• Honorary Fellowships: Conferred at a separate event organised by the University, these are typically given to business, professional, and community figures who have lent sustained support to the institution. Many serve—or have served—on the University’s Council, its Court, or as alumni. If the honorary doctorate carries the weight of "international academic stature," the fellowship is closer to an acknowledgement of having "walked alongside HKUST."
• Congregations are numbered, and the number does not always match the calendar year. HKUST Congregations follow a numerical sequence: 26 November 2022 was the 30th Congregation^※, 2023 was the 31st, and 2025 will be the 35th. Because ceremonies were postponed, split, and combined during the 2020–2022 pandemic period, readers may notice Congregation numbers advancing faster than the calendar years. The 30th Congregation carried an additional significance: it was also the occasion on which HKUST formally installed its first woman President, Nancy Ip^※—whose own academic background is covered in Top Scholars.

One verifiable observation: HKUST’s accolades have sometimes arrived before the wider world reached the same conclusion. At the 25th Congregation in 2017, CRISPR gene-editing pioneer Emmanuelle Charpentier received an honorary doctorate in Science^※; three years later she shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jennifer Doudna. The gap between the honour and the Nobel is itself a footnote testifying to HKUST’s foresight.

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# 2. Honorary Doctoral Degrees

# 2025 Congregation (35th)

The 2025 HKUST Congregation^※ conferred honorary doctorates upon five distinguished leaders:

Profiles of Key Recipients:

• Liu Cixin: Author of The Three-Body Problem and the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award^※. The book has been published in 35 languages^※ and sold over 30 million copies^※ worldwide.
• Sir Christopher Pissarides: Specialises in the search-and-matching theory of labour markets. He also holds a chair professorship at HKUST’s IAS (the first Nobel laureate to become a full-time faculty member); his current research examines the impact of AI on the future of work. His academic background is further detailed in Notable Professors & Academic Leaders.
• Roger Kornberg: Renowned for groundbreaking work on the mechanism of gene transcription, notably the discovery of the nucleosome and the mapping of RNA polymerase II function, milestones in the field; previously awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry^※. He also became a Senior Visiting Fellow at HKUST’s IAS in February 2025—the honour and the institutional affiliation came almost simultaneously.

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# 2024 Congregation (34th)

The 2024 HKUST Congregation, on 23 November^※, conferred honorary doctorates upon four distinguished leaders:

Profiles of Key Recipients:

• Jensen Huang: Led NVIDIA to become the world's most valuable company by market capitalisation^※, with GPU technology powering the global AI revolution.
• Tony Leung: The first Asian actor^※ to receive a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2023 Venice Film Festival; known for his philanthropic work and his range of roles.
• Michael Levitt: A biophysicist who advanced structural biology through computational methods; has served as an IAS Senior Visiting Fellow at HKUST since March 2024.
• David Mumford: A Fields Medallist^※ who first established himself with the theory of moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, and later shifted to computer vision and pattern theory. A rare scholar who has left a deep mark on both pure and applied mathematics, he is now Professor Emeritus at Brown University and Harvard University.

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# 2023 Congregation (31st)

HKUST's 31st Congregation, on 17 November 2023^※, conferred honorary doctorates upon six distinguished leaders:

Profiles of Key Recipients:

• Yann LeCun: Renowned for his revolutionary work on convolutional neural networks, recipient of the Turing Award^※, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, and one of the "three giants" of deep learning.
• Michelle Yeoh: The first person of Asian descent^※ to win the Academy Award for Best Actress (2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once); she also serves as a goodwill ambassador for multiple UN and international bodies.
• Eric Wieschaus: A developmental biologist who elucidated the genetic control mechanisms of early embryonic development in fruit flies, work that earned him the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine^※. He is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biology at Princeton University.
• Andrew Liao and Carlson Tong: Two senior Hong Kong figures from the legal and financial worlds were honoured in the same year. Andrew Liao^※, a Senior Counsel and then Chairman of the HKUST Court, received a Doctor of Laws honoris causa; Carlson Tong, who has held a long series of regulatory and financial posts, received a Doctor of Business Administration honoris causa. Placing international academic stars alongside local governance stalwarts in a single cohort is a neat illustration of HKUST’s dual-pronged approach to its honorary degrees.

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# 2022 Congregation (30th)

HKUST’s 30th Congregation took place on 26 November 2022^※. The ceremony also installed the University’s first woman President, Nancy Ip, and conferred honorary doctorates on four distinguished individuals:

Profiles of Key Recipients:

• Kan Yuet-Wai: A pioneering figure in the genetics of Chinese populations, he identified blood disorders such as thalassemia and sickle-cell anaemia using DNA diagnostic techniques^※, laying the foundation for prenatal genetic diagnosis. He chaired the Croucher Foundation from 1997 to 2011, providing sustained funding for Hong Kong’s basic research.
• Wang Xiaodong: An international authority on the mechanism of apoptosis (programmed cell death); his research on the process^※ has propelled the development of new drugs designed to overcome cancer cells’ resistance to apoptosis. He was the first mainland Chinese scholar to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences after the reform and opening-up period began.
• Yip Wing-Sie: A defining figure on Hong Kong’s conducting scene, she has long led the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and brought music education into the wider community. The presence of this category of honorary doctorate shows that HKUST’s honours are not confined to science and engineering.
• Sir Jim McDonald: Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde and an academic leader in engineering and energy. His honorary degree in Engineering also reflects the institutional collaboration between HKUST and Strathclyde—in 2025, HKUST President Nancy Ip herself received an honorary degree from Strathclyde, in a mutual exchange of honours.

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# 2020 Honorary Doctorates and Fellowships

In 2020, HKUST^※ conferred the following honorary doctorates:

Profiles of Key Recipients:

• John Hardy: A Chair Professor at UCL^※ who proposed the "amyloid cascade hypothesis" of Alzheimer’s disease and identified the relevant genetic mutations, providing a framework for the molecular understanding of the condition.
• Kenneth Pomeranz: Author of the global-history classic The Great Divergence, which reframed the question of why the economies of East Asia and Western Europe took different paths around the time of the Industrial Revolution—one of the most widely cited arguments in contemporary economic and global history.
• Chan Ka-Keung Ceajer: Adjunct Professor and Professor Emeritus at HKUST who spent many years in senior government financial-policy roles. Straddling academia and public service, his honorary doctorate in Business Administration is one example of HKUST honouring one of its own.

A recent trend in the honorary doctorates: Looking across the six cohorts listed above (2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), a steady pattern emerges: HKUST’s honorary doctorates consistently rest on a few pillars—Nobel-, Fields-, or Turing-level scientists (Kornberg, Levitt, Mumford, LeCun, Wieschaus, Kan, Wang), technology and finance leaders driving industry (Huang, Schwarzman, Khosla), and representatives of culture and the public sphere (Liu Cixin, Yeoh, Leung, Yip). For a university built on science and engineering, HKUST is hardly stingy in awarding degrees in the humanities and arts—a quiet echo of its self-conception as a university of science and technology that is "not only about science and technology."

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# Earlier Milestones: 2014 and 2017

Two earlier Congregations are particularly illuminating about the direction of HKUST’s honours.

The 25th Congregation in 2017 (17 November 2017) awarded four honorary doctorates:

The 22nd Congregation in 2014 (7 November 2014) awarded five honorary doctorates, including to UC Berkeley Chair Professor of Biology Mu-Ming Poo (蒲慕明)^※ (Science; later led the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Neuroscience and oversaw the first successful cloning of a primate via somatic cell nuclear transfer); Sequoia Capital Chairman Sir Michael Moritz^※ (Letters); UCLA Chair Professor Chih-Ming Ho (何志明)^※ (Engineering); sociologist Yu Xie (謝宇)^※ (Social Science); and former Council Vice-Chairman Dr. Mak Hoi-Hung (Social Science). The fact that Charpentier was honoured in 2017 and won the Nobel Prize in 2020 is the factual case behind the opening assertion of "honours that precede the Nobel."

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# 3. Honorary Fellowships

If the honorary doctorates lean toward international academic stardom, the honorary fellowships function more like a thank-you letter the University writes to those who have walked alongside it: recipients are typically people who have made sustained donations, participated in governance, or brought prestige to Hong Kong, and among them are many HKUST alumni, Council members, and Court members. What follows is a year-by-year listing of the five cohorts from 2021 to 2025.

# 2025

HKUST in 2025^※ conferred Honorary Fellowships on six individuals:

Mak Kin Fai earned his undergraduate degree in Physics and Mathematics from HKUST (2005)^※, took a PhD in Physics at Columbia University, rose through the ranks at Cornell, and in 2024^※ became a Director at a Max Planck Institute in Germany. He has published over 100 papers^※ cited more than 60,000 times^※ and enjoys an international reputation in two-dimensional quantum materials; as a physicist who came through HKUST’s undergraduate programme, his trajectory is also recorded in Notable Alumni. In the same cohort, David Wang is a leading figure in the study of modern Chinese literature overseas, while Zhou Lidong has long directed basic research at Microsoft Research Asia—one from the humanities, one from the sciences, illustrating the breadth of the Honorary Fellowships.

# 2024

HKUST in 2024^※ conferred Honorary Fellowships on five individuals:

Ko Ping-Keung is a key link between HKUST’s academic lineage and industry: he is a Professor Emeritus of Electronic and Computer Engineering, a former Dean of Engineering, and an early angel investor in DJI. Together with Li Zexiang and others, he forms part of the "mentor–capital" network that lies at the origin of HKUST’s hard-tech startup genealogy—the story is picked up in Frank Wang & DJI.

# 2023

HKUST in 2023^※ conferred Honorary Fellowships on six individuals:

This cohort spans a wide spectrum—law, property, sport, finance, and music sit side by side. The inclusion of the cyclist Sarah Lee is especially rare, signalling that the yardstick of "contribution" for the Honorary Fellowships is not confined to academia or wealth: it also recognises public figures who have brought international acclaim to Hong Kong.

# 2022

On 30 September 2022, HKUST^※ conferred Honorary Fellowships on five individuals:

# 2021

On 12 October 2021, HKUST^※ conferred Honorary Fellowships on five individuals:

Placing the five fellowship cohorts from 2021 to 2025 side by side renders one common thread unmistakable: deep engagement in philanthropy and governance. The Lee Shau Kee Foundation, the Shaw Foundation, the Yeh Family Philanthropy, the Lee Kum Kee Family Foundation, and other families that have long supported HKUST all have representatives on these lists. And figures such as Yu Tongxi, Ko Ping-Keung, and Daniel Yu are teaching and research stalwarts who came from within HKUST and have given back to the University and to industry. The Honorary Fellowship is less a prize bestowed on outsiders than a public salute from the University to its long-term fellow travellers—and this, at root, is what distinguishes it from the Honorary Doctorate.

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# 4. The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS): HKUST’s Nobel Network

HKUST’s Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) has a system of Visiting Professors and Senior Visiting Fellows, inviting international academic leaders to Hong Kong to conduct research and exchange. The Institute is designed as a cross-disciplinary, top-tier research platform; the theoretical physicist C. N. Yang served as the founding Chairman of its International Advisory Board, laying the foundations for its early academic prestige and international network. The IAS directory^※ records a remarkably dense network of leading scholars—multiple Nobel and Fields laureates who have maintained, or still maintain, an academic connection to HKUST:

This table tells several stories:

• The Nobel contingent has been "thickening" in recent years. Schekman (from 2019), Levitt (from 2024), and Kornberg (from 2025) have all joined in quick succession as Senior Visiting Fellows. The number of Nobel-calibre scholars resident at the IAS shows a clear upward trend, rather than a one-off appearance. In the cases of Levitt and Kornberg, the pattern is even more striking: each received an HKUST honorary doctorate first and then took up an IAS Senior Visiting Fellowship, so the honour and the affiliation mutually reinforce each other.
• Pissarides is the only full-time Nobel laureate on the faculty. Holding the title of Y. K. Pao Professor-at-Large, he is based at HKUST full-time, focusing on search-and-matching in labour markets, structural transformation, and economic growth. In April 2024 he delivered a lecture at HKUST titled Automation Technologies and the Future of Jobs: Should We Be Afraid of AI?^※, training his classic unemployment theory on the employment questions of the AI era.
• Equal weight is given to mathematics and interdisciplinarity. The roster extends beyond Nobel laureates to include two Fields Medallists—Atiyah (topology and geometry, 1966) and Bhargava (number theory, 2014). And the Nobel disciplines stretch across Physics (Nakamura’s blue LED, Smoot’s cosmic microwave background), Chemistry (Ciechanover’s ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation), and Economics (Maskin’s mechanism design). This refusal to bet on a single field makes the IAS feel more like a comprehensive advanced-studies platform than an enclave of a single discipline.
• Local scholars are on the list too. Neutrino physicist Luk Kam-Biu holds the Paul C. W. Chu Professorship at the IAS and has served as its Acting Director; his work on the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment is covered in Notable Professors & Academic Leaders. The father of OLED, Ching W. Tang, also served as an IAS Professor (2013–2022); his academic career is detailed in Ching W. Tang, OLED & the Kyoto Prize.

It is also worth noting that C. N. Yang, as the founding Chairman of the IAS International Advisory Board (2006–2013), laid the groundwork for the Institute’s early international academic standing and its network of contacts—a starting point that cannot be overlooked in explaining how a university barely a decade old at the time was able to gather such a concentration of top-tier scholars.

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# 5. Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between an Honorary Doctorate and an Honorary Fellowship? An Honorary Doctorate (honoris causa) recognises outstanding achievement in academia, science and technology, business, culture, or public service, and is awarded by field (Engineering, Science, Humanities, Social Science, Business Administration, Law, etc.). An Honorary Fellowship is more often conferred on individuals who have made a direct contribution to the University’s development and to Hong Kong society. The two are conferred at separate ceremonies, and fellowship recipients often include members of the University’s Council, Court, and alumni.

How many Nobel laureates does HKUST have? HKUST has no precedent of a member of its own faculty "winning" a Nobel Prize while in post. However, through its honorary doctorates and the Institute for Advanced Study, the University has established formal ties with a large number of Nobel laureates. From the IAS directory^※ alone, one can count Nobel laureates C. N. Yang, Pissarides, Kornberg, Levitt, Schekman, Maskin, Nakamura, Ciechanover, and Smoot, along with Fields Medallists Atiyah and Bhargava. Among them, Pissarides is based at HKUST full-time as a chair professor.

Which well-known figures have received honorary doctorates recently? In technology and business: NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang (2024) and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman (2025). In culture and the arts: The Three-Body Problem author Liu Cixin (2025), Academy Award-winning actress Michelle Yeoh (2023), and actor Tony Leung (2024). In academia: Turing Award laureate Yann LeCun, and multiple Nobel and Fields laureates.

Are there any athletes among the Honorary Fellows? Yes. In 2023, Hong Kong track cyclist Sarah Lee (a two-time Olympic medallist and UCI Track Cycling World Champion) received an Honorary Fellowship—a relatively rare public sporting figure on the list, which demonstrates that the measure of "contribution" is not defined solely by academia or wealth.

What research does Pissarides do at HKUST? As the Y. K. Pao Professor-at-Large, he studies search-and-matching in labour markets, structural transformation, and economic growth, and has recently turned his attention to AI and the future of employment. He delivered a lecture on the subject at HKUST in April 2024^※.

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# Further Reading

• Top Scholars — The academic backgrounds of HKUST’s five Presidents and a group portrait of its academicians, including the first woman President, Nancy Ip.
• Notable Professors & Academic Leaders — The research achievements of serving professors including Pissarides and Luk Kam-Biu.
• Notable Alumni — Includes the academic trajectory of Honorary Fellow Mak Kin Fai.
• Ching W. Tang, OLED & the Kyoto Prize — The father of OLED, a former IAS Professor.
• Frank Wang & DJI — The HKUST hard-tech startup genealogy within which Honorary Fellow Ko Ping-Keung sits.
• Founding President Woo Chia-Wei — The institutional vision behind the honours system.

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