A "sanctuary for thought" allied with the Princeton IAS — how HKUST weaves its Nobel laureate network

In a nutshell: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (HKUST IAS) has been, since 2009^※, one of only three universities in China to sign a formal partnership with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Through a Nobel laureate advisory board, a network of named professorships, and the UC RUSAL President's Forum, it hosted over 1,900^※ international academic events across its first two decades (2006–2026), making it the densest platform for Nobel laureates in Hong Kong. This concentration represents an alternative internationalisation pathway—one built on people rather than institutions—running in parallel with HKUST's membership in over 40 global university alliances (see Global Partnerships & University Alliances^※).

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# Where did the HKUST IAS come from?

The story of the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study begins with an unprecedented lecture. On 15 June 2006^※, cosmologist Stephen Hawking travelled to Clear Water Bay to deliver the newly founded IAS's inaugural lecture, "The Origin of the Universe," to an audience of over 2,200 students, staff, and members of the public—a sensation across Hong Kong. This was the IAS's institutional birth rite; it was promptly embedded as a core initiative of HKUST Strategic Plan 2005–2020^※, with a vision of becoming a "sanctuary for thought" where the world's foremost scholars could interact freely.

The IAS's founding director was the then Vice-Chancellor and President of HKUST, Professor Paul C. W. Chu—himself a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a pioneering physicist in superconductivity. More crucially, the IAS anchored itself from day one on "top-tier intellectual counsel": Nobel Laureate in Physics Chen-Ning Yang (awarded 1957) served as the founding Chairman of the IAS International Advisory Board^※. His "wisdom and foresight were crucial in guiding the IAS through its initial challenges and in shaping the very foundations of the Institute," a role he held until his passing in October 2025 at the age of 103.

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# How did HKUST become a partner to the Princeton IAS?

The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, founded in 1930, is the symbolic global landmark of unfettered academic inquiry—the intellectual home where Einstein, von Neumann, and other titans of twentieth-century scholarship once worked. In January 2009, HKUST became one of only three universities in China to establish a formal partnership with the Princeton IAS, and the IAS International Advisory Board held its first meeting on the HKUST campus to mark the occasion^※. That same year, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) also signed a memorandum of understanding on 16 March 2009^※, becoming another partner institution—the agreement aimed to facilitate scholar exchange visits and joint academic conferences, and to provide resources for Chinese scholars to visit the Princeton IAS. It is worth contrasting this with HKUST's own concurrent initiative: the Association of East Asian Research Universities (AEARU), founded 1996^※, which took an "institution-to-institution" regional alliance approach. The Princeton IAS partnership, by contrast, moved through "top individual scholars." Both internationalisation pathways run in parallel at HKUST, forming the twin wings of its global network.

The logic behind this partnership arrangement lies in the deep compatibility of academic ethos: the Princeton IAS has always been renowned for cutting-edge research in mathematics, physics, and historical and social sciences, while HKUST IAS equally gathers scholars around an operating model of interdisciplinary, curiosity-driven inquiry. The connection is also embodied at the personnel level. Princeton IAS Professor Eric Maskin, a founder of mechanism design theory and 2007 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences^※, joined HKUST IAS as a Visiting Member in March 2010, delivering lectures and engaging intensively with faculty and students across disciplines—a textbook case of the institutional relationship materialising into substantive scholarly exchange.

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# The 2013 naming ceremony: a Nobel network takes shape

On 27 November 2013^※, backed by a grant of over HK$71 million from The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust (part of total Jockey Club donations to HKUST exceeding HK$2.5 billion^※ over 26 years), the IAS was formally renamed the "HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study." The same day saw the announcement of three Named Professorship appointments—the single most emblematic moment of talent aggregation in the IAS's history.

At the ceremony, then Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Tony F. Chan declared that the IAS's mission was "to advance the University's strengths, promote innovation and technology development in Hong Kong, and establish the city as a global intellectual hub." The three inaugural named chairs formed the core nodes of HKUST's Nobel laureate network:

Ching W. Tang is the first Chinese winner of the Wolf Prize in Chemistry^※. After 31 years at Kodak Research Laboratories, where he invented the high-efficiency OLED technology that underpins modern smartphone and television screens, he joined HKUST in 2013 to hold the IAS Bank of East Asia Professorship, with joint appointments in Electronic and Computer Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics.

Crucially, these named professorships were not isolated one-off appointments; they were embedded within an ongoing institutional framework. In February 2013, HKUST held its first-ever Inauguration Ceremony of Named Professorships, at which 13 distinguished faculty received named chairs—10 of whom were IAS Senior Fellows or Visiting Professors^※. Over seventy per cent of the new named professorships fell within the IAS system, confirming that the Institute was not peripheral decoration for the University's internationalisation, but the primary vehicle of its named-chair regime.

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# Pissarides: why would a Nobel economist land at HKUST?

Sir Christopher Pissarides was the first Nobel laureate ever appointed to a chaired professorship at HKUST^※—a hire whose historical significance goes beyond mere academic recruitment. A faculty member at the London School of Economics (LSE) for over four decades, he is a founder of search-and-matching theory and shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Dale Mortensen and Peter Diamond for their contributions to labour economics, particularly the analysis of markets with search frictions and unemployment^※. Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013, he accepted the "IAS Helmut & Anna Pao Sohmen Professor-at-Large" position at HKUST that same year.

Pissarides's HKUST identity carries a dual significance. First, the strand of labour macroeconomics he represents speaks directly to the structural workforce challenges facing Hong Kong, lending world-class academic credibility to local policy research. Second, his IAS chair created a sustainable mechanism for scholarly connection: his regular visits to HKUST for public lectures and research forums channel the frontiers of international labour economics into Hong Kong's academic milieu. In 2025 he was further honoured with an HKUST honorary doctorate.

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# Uhlmann's "invisibility cloak mathematics": another dimension of interdisciplinarity

If Pissarides embodies the connection between social science and the Nobel, Gunther Uhlmann represents the IAS's absorption of pure-mathematical frontiers. The holder of the IAS Si Yuan Professorship, Uhlmann is a world leader in the mathematics of inverse problems^※, studying wave scattering, partial differential equations, and the mathematical underpinnings of cloaking technology. In 2003 he proved that two distinctly different objects can produce identical scattering waves; physicists subsequently used this result to design real-world "invisibility cloaks," transforming a Harry Potter fantasy into a mathematical theorem.

Uhlmann's research applications span geophysical exploration and medical imaging, embodying the IAS's founding ethos of linking fundamental research to regional development. He received the 2021 AMS–SIAM George David Birkhoff Prize^※, is a member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary doctorates from multiple leading international universities.

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# The UC RUSAL President's Forum: bringing Nobel laureates into public space

Another outward-extending node in HKUST's Nobel network is the UC RUSAL President's Forum, launched in 2010. In June 2010, UC RUSAL, the world's largest aluminium producer, signed a five-year cooperation agreement with HKUST with a total sponsorship value of US$1.5 million^※ (covering academic years 2010/11 to 2014/15). A core element was the creation of this forum under the IAS framework, which was designed to bring leading figures from international politics, business, and academia to Hong Kong each semester for public lectures.

Chaired by then Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Tony F. Chan, the forum debuted on 21 September 2010, when UC RUSAL CEO Oleg Deripaska spoke on "The Power of Focus" to an audience of over 3,000. Subsequent speakers have included further Nobel laureates: Dan Shechtman, Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and 2011 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, appeared at the forum on 26 October 2015^※ to lecture on "Technological Entrepreneurship – A key to world peace and prosperity"; Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences Sir Christopher Pissarides has also spoken in the forum's series.

The significance of the UC RUSAL Forum is that it draws the scholars within the IAS network out of the closed seminar room and toward a broader public and student audience—realising the IAS mission statement of enabling "the world's most brilliant minds to intersect catalytically with Hong Kong society."

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# A constellation of Nobel advisors: from C. N. Yang to Smoot to Maskin

HKUST IAS's Nobel laureate network extends well beyond the three named chairs listed above. It is built upon a multi-layered architecture of scholars:

In addition, the IAS International Advisory Board has included numerous other Nobel laureates over the years; early records indicate that a majority of its 15 members were Nobel Prize winners, bringing in figures such as Yuan T. Lee (Chemistry, 1986), Ferid Murad (Physiology or Medicine, 1998), Douglas Osheroff (Physics, 1996), and Samuel C. C. Ting (Physics, 1976)—a concentration of intellectual firepower that is extraordinarily rare for any university that had existed for barely three decades.

The Senior Visiting Fellows listed above are not ceremonial titles; their academic weight merits individual treatment:

• Aaron Ciechanover: Professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, appointed an IAS Senior Visiting Fellow in May 2008^※. He won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry^※ for discovering ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation and also received an HKUST honorary doctorate in 2008—his IAS appointment and honorary degree landing almost simultaneously, a textbook example of the twin-track "academic collaboration plus honorary recognition" approach.
• Shuji Nakamura: Chair Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics^※ for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which enabled bright white LED lighting. He served as an IAS Senior Visiting Fellow from 2008 to 2020, during which time he delivered an IAS talk titled "Lighting Up Our Lives: Blue LEDs"—bringing the technical history of an industry-defining invention directly into the HKUST classroom.
• Roger Kornberg: Winzer Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University and 2006 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry^※ for his work on the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. Appointed an IAS Senior Visiting Fellow from February 2025^※, he is one of the newest members to join the IAS Nobel network.
• Michael Levitt: Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor of Cancer Research at Stanford University, who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry^※ with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel for developing multiscale models for complex chemical systems. Appointed an IAS Senior Visiting Fellow from March 2024^※, he has also spoken at IAS on "The Birth and Future of Multiscale Modeling of Macromolecules."

These four appointments, concentrated between 2024 and 2025, demonstrate that the IAS's Nobel network has not slowed as the Institute reaches its twentieth year but is instead continuing to recruit new members during the Jockey Club's second cycle of support.

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# The 2026 Nobel Symposium: a crescendo for the Institute's 20th year

In a nutshell: On 6 February 2026, the IAS staged a Nobel Symposium titled "Horizons Unbound: Exploring the Ultimate Frontiers of Science" at Jockey Club Lecture Theatre II, bringing three Nobel Laureates in Physics onto a single stage to mark the dual milestones of HKUST's 35th anniversary and the IAS's 20th anniversary^※.

The speaker roster was itself a distillation of twenty years of IAS accumulation:

The organisers stated the symposium aimed to "foster connections among the world's foremost scientific leaders and reinforce HKUST's role as a global hub for knowledge advancement and talent development." Tellingly, Founding Director Paul Chu appeared on stage alongside three Nobel laureates without himself holding the prize, a detail that perfectly echoes the positioning the IAS has held from the beginning: it aggregates not just Nobel medals but entire generations of paradigm-shifting researchers, whether or not the individual ultimately received the call from Stockholm. This also chimes with the named professorship network established at the 2013 naming ceremony: across two decades, the IAS completed a transition from "inviting Nobel laureates to visit" to "systematically absorbing leading scholars through institutionalised mechanisms."

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# After 1,900 events, where does the IAS sit on the global academic map?

From its founding in 2006 through to 2026, the IAS has hosted over 1,900 international academic events^※, and in February 2026 held its Nobel Symposium under the theme "Horizons Unbound: Exploring the Ultimate Frontiers of Science" to celebrate the 35th anniversary of HKUST and the 20th anniversary of the IAS^※, bringing together multiple Nobel Laureates in Physics before an audience of over 450 students, faculty, and members of the public.

Viewed through the lens of international academic connectivity, the IAS's core competitive strength lies not in a ranking figure but in the "scarce-contact mechanisms" it has constructed: the formal partnership agreement with the Princeton IAS, the named professorship and visiting fellowship systems, and public interfaces such as the UC RUSAL President's Forum. Together these allow HKUST systematically to introduce the world's most advanced thinkers into Hong Kong's research and public-intellectual ecosystem, rather than relying on ad hoc scholarly visits. This deliberate "network weaving" is the institutional rationale for HKUST's positioning of itself in the Asia-Pacific region as a "sanctuary for thought" rather than an ordinary research university.

This model is the complement to HKUST's internationalisation efforts at the level of student mobility and cross-institutional curricula: the Nobel laureate network addresses the task of "top-tier intellectual connectivity," while Student Exchange & International Mobility^※ and Dual Degrees & Joint Degree Programmes^※ address the question of everyday participation by students and faculty in the global academic community. Together they form the complete picture of HKUST's internationalisation strategy—institutional alliances providing the breadth, the IAS network providing the height.

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# Further reading

• Global Partnerships & University Alliances^※ — HKUST's 40+ global university alliances, dual business school accreditations, and recent emerging collaborations
• AEARU & Regional Academic Alliances^※ — The alternative regional internationalisation pathway HKUST launched in 1996
• Student Exchange & International Mobility^※ — Cross-institutional mobility mechanisms at the student and faculty level
• Dual Degrees & Joint Degree Programmes^※ — Degree-level collaboration with overseas institutions

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