Honorary Doctorates, Honorary Fellowships, and Visiting Professors

Each year during the Congregation, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) confers Honorary Doctoral Degrees and Honorary Fellowships. Honorary doctorates are awarded to international figures of outstanding achievement in academia, science, technology, business, culture or public affairs; honorary fellowships are more commonly conferred on individuals who have made direct contributions to the University’s development and to Hong Kong society. This article compiles the documented lists from recent years (2020–2025).

# I. Honorary Doctoral Degrees

# 2025 Congregation (the 35th)

HKUST’s 2025 Congregation^※ conferred honorary doctorates on five distinguished leaders:

Brief profiles of key recipients:

• Liu Cixin: author of The Three-Body Problem and the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award^※; his work has been translated into 35 languages^※ and has sold more than 30 million copies^※ worldwide.
• Sir Christopher Pissarides: renowned for his work on search-and-matching theory in labour markets. He now also serves as a Chair Professor at HKUST’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) — the first Nobel laureate to hold a full-time faculty position at the University — and his current research addresses the impact of AI on the future of employment.
• Roger Kornberg: celebrated for groundbreaking research on the mechanism of gene transcription; the discovery of the nucleosome and the mapping of RNA polymerase II function are regarded as milestones in the field. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry^※.

# 2024 Congregation (the 34th)

HKUST’s Congregation on 23 November 2024^※ conferred honorary doctorates on four distinguished leaders:

Brief profiles of key recipients:

• Jensen Huang: has led NVIDIA to become the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation^※, driving global AI development with GPU technology.
• Tony Leung Chiu-Wai: the first Asian actor^※ to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, recognised for his charity work and for interpreting a wide range of roles.
• Michael Levitt: a biophysicist who advanced structural biology through computational methods; he previously served as an IAS Senior Visiting Fellow at HKUST.

# 2023 Congregation (the 31st)

HKUST’s 31st Congregation, held on 17 November 2023^※, conferred honorary doctorates on six distinguished individuals:

Brief profiles of key recipients:

• Yann LeCun: renowned for pioneering convolutional neural networks, for which he received the Turing Award^※; now Chief AI Scientist at Meta and recognised as one of the three godfathers of deep learning.
• Michelle Yeoh: the first Asian artist^※ to win the Academy Award for Best Actress (2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once); she also serves as a Goodwill Ambassador for several United Nations and international bodies.

# 2020 Honorary Doctorates and Fellowships

HKUST in 2020^※ conferred the following honorary doctorates:

# II. Honorary Fellowships

# 2025

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

Mak Kin Fai earned his BSc in Physics and Mathematics from HKUST (2005)^※, followed by a PhD in Physics from Columbia University and a subsequent rise at Cornell University. In 2024^※ he was appointed Director of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. He has published over 100 papers^※ that have been cited more than 60,000 times^※, and enjoys an international reputation in the field of two-dimensional quantum materials.

# 2024

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

# 2023

HKUST conferred Honorary Fellowships on six individuals in 2023^※ (including Andrew Liao Cheung-sing, who also received an Honorary Doctor of Laws at the same year’s Congregation).

# III. Visiting Professors and Senior Fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)

HKUST’s Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) runs a visiting professorship and senior visiting fellow programme, which brings international academic leaders to Hong Kong for research and exchange. Several Nobel laureates and Fields Medalists have maintained scholarly ties with HKUST through this programme: