200 Congregation booklet_1701_Final

2 Professor (Victor) Dzau, Vice President (Ian) Holliday, colleagues, graduands, parents, fellow alumni, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I f the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented the Age of Reason in Europe, then ours must be the Age of Anger, a term coined by Indian thinker Pankaj Mishra. Looking back to the future then, we would be wise to take a leaf out of the Enlightenment to mitigate the worst of our present collective unreasoned wrath, against each other and with ourselves. So what did the French philosophes , Scottish thinkers, Georgian intellectuals and Weimar classicists do? Amongst other deeds, they established learned academies and bolstered universities. At this 200th Congregation, it is most fitting then that we welcome back one of our own honorary graduates from the 195th Congregation President Victor Dzau of the US National Academy of Medicine, which is one of three academies that make up the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the United States. And just at the present juncture of the tensest relationship between the world’s two largest economies in decades, set against the broader geopolitical canvas of nationalism, populism and even tribalism rearing their fearsome heads, it is apropos that academia and the scientific community doubly reinforce our non-partisan links. Whom better to rebuild the “Chimerica” bridge than Victor who personifies the essence of both of these great countries? He was born in Shanghai, completed primary and secondary education in Hong Kong, read medicine in Canada, and subsequently took the chairs of medicine at both Stanford and Harvard, then the entire medical enterprise at Duke which during his time spread its wings to Singapore and now serves at the pinnacle institution of medical and health thought leadership in the world. For those of you who are probably thinking that Victor is too much of a living deity to relate to, in fact, he remains very much grounded in the academic trenches studying miRNA-based strategies for myocardial protection and regeneration that are supported by multiple NIH R01 grants to this day. To call Victor a bridge builder is no mere polite cliché. Through his personal intervention, buttressed by the generosity of HKU Council member and Convocation Chairman Dr Patrick Poon, S TAT E OF THE FACULT Y ADDRE SS BY PROF E SSOR GABR I E L M L EUNG Dean of Medicine