Background and Objective

One of the Strategic Objectives in HKUST’s 5 Year Strategic Plan 2020 (extended to 2022) is to “be a LEADER in education and research – setting the trends for future”.

The strategic goal is to originate frontier knowledge and excel in breakthrough research in selected areas to set the trends for new and impactful research directions and thinking.

Five strategic areas of data science, sustainability, public policy, autonomous systems & robotics, and design thinking & entrepreneurship are targeted for building up research strengths and for establishing effective mechanisms to support these five directed research areas.

In pursuing this goal, a 25th A Clustered Hiring Campaign was launched in 2014 to conduct clustered hiring in areas deemed to be strategically important to HKUST’s future development alongside with the establishment of 4 NEW research institutes in Big Data Institute, Energy Institute, Institute for Public Policy and Robotics Institute, and the strengthening of an existing institute, the Institute for Environment.