State of the Faculty Address 2020

4 Research and Innovation Our research achievements were of course not limited to COVID-19. On research funding, we continue to excel and have still improved by considerable margins. HKUMed’s total research funding awarded exceeded HK$2 billion in the past year. Foremost, we have won the largest number of InnoHK hubs in HKU and for any faculty across the entire tertiary sector across Hong Kong, totaling HK$1,628 million for the following five centres: • Centre for Immunology and Infection (Professor Malik Peiris, Public Health) • Centre for Oncology and Immunology (Professors Tak Wah Mak/SY Leung, Pathology) • Centre for Translational Stem Cell Biology (Professor Pengtao Liu, Biomedical Sciences) • Centre for Virology, Vaccinology and Therapeutics (Professor KY Yuen, Microbiology) • Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health (Professor Gabriel Leung, Public Health) All five hubs have already executed Master Agreements and set up HKU wholly-owned operation companies. Renovation and outfitting works, as well as procurement of major equipment, have just commenced with the first tranche of funding transfer. Collectively these projects involve 47 HKUMed professoriate and 32 overseas collaborators. They plan to hire an additional 122 junior professoriate and postdocs, 21 senior scientific/technical staff and 68 research support personnel.