V23I1 Special

2 Professor (Jennifer) Doudna, President, Provost, Vice Presidents, colleagues, graduands, parents, fellow alumni, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, O ne hundred and thirty years is a long time, especially in rapidly developing China that had experienced in that historical space dynastic rule, foreign occupation and concessions, republican revolution, civil war, foreign invasion, founding of the modern state, internal struggles, economic liberalisation, and more recently national rejuvenation and emerging geopolitical leadership. One constant, amongst few others, during the past century and some has been our school, variously called the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, Hong Kong College of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine of The University of Hong Kong, and since 2005 Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. Not only were we by far the oldest local tertiary institution, we are the third school of western medicine established in the country (after Boji Medical College, forerunner of present-day Sun Yat-Sen University Zhongshan School of Medicine founded in 1866, and Peiyang (or Bei Yang) Medical College in Tianjin that was first inaugurated as the Viceroy’s Hospital Medical School in 1881). We also boast an uninterrupted history since our founding. Fast forward from 1887 to today, where are we? Notwithstanding the many imperfections of ranking exercises, and at the risk of sounding unmannerly, I am pleased to report that we are ranked third in Asia by both QS and Times Higher Education, or 34th and 31st in the world respectively. Nationally, an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently ranked Queen Mary Hospital, our flagship teaching hospital for 80 years and counting, third in the country after the People’s Liberation Army 301 Hospital and Peking Union Medical College Hospital, both in Beijing. With our legacy and present achievements, where are we heading? The equivalent Latin expression quo vadis entitled the late Professor Sir David Todd’s Halnan Lecture celebrating the inauguration of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine complex almost two decades ago in 1998. Here and now, as we enter the first day of the fifth month in mourning Sir David’s passing, I ask again the reflective question he then posed. In attempting an answer, I take the opportunity to summarise the work of the Deanery during the past five years while sketching a vision for the next decade. Foremost, our priority has always been to plan for the future of our graduates, and by extension that of generations of patients here and everywhere. We set our sights not just on next year’s rankings or the Research Assessment Exercise in 2020, rather we S TAT E OF THE FACULT Y ADDRE SS BY PROF E SSOR GABR I E L M L EUNG Dean of Medicine