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3 we will be co-hosting the first NAM-HKU fellow in global health leadership who will be spending two years reading for a HKU MPH degree and interning at the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, DC. Over time this cohort of young Asian leaders will form the professional lattice of mutual understanding for the betterment of both our countries. Research and Innovation The Faculty’s Centre of Genomic Sciences (CGS) was initially established as the Genome Research Centre more than a decade and a half ago. Since those early and heady days which witnessed our direct contribution to 2% of the globally collaborative human haplotype mapping project and the critical role in sequencing the SARS coronavirus for global epidemic control, CGS has grown from strength to strength in carving out our niche in tailoring services from sample handling to bioinformatics interpretation. More recently, with generous funding support by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and the Hongkong Bank Foundation, it has built new single-cell sequencing platforms, boosted capabilities in proteomics and metabolomics, established a multidisciplinary biobank, and expanded its bioinformatics consultancy and original research capabilities. Over the next few years, we will be doubling down and continuing to invest heavily in state-of-the-science equipment acquisition and proactive faculty and staff recruitment. CGS will become the Centre for PanorOmic Sciences or CPOS in short. It will take a panoromic approach to understanding health and disease, from “pre-womb to tomb” as per Eric Topol’s conception of precision medicine. One of CPOS’s major axes of work will concern a multi-omics approach to understanding and treating cancer at the HKU- Jockey Club Centre for Clinical Innovation and Discovery at the soon-to-be-redeveloped Grantham Hospital. In parallel, the Chief Executive, our Chancellor, has renewed her call for a Big Data Analytics Platform at the Hospital Authority (HA) which holds valuable health and health care phenotypic and laboratory information on essentially the whole population. HA in turn will implement a small pilot programme, called “HA Data Collaboration Laboratory”, beginning next calendar year. While we welcome such a move, it needs to be much bolder in scale and scope to be commensurate with Government’s innovation and technology aspirations. The window for Hong Kong to leverage this unique resource is fast closing. The rest of the world will not wait. Judicious prudence is right, but bureaucratic inertia and an unnecessarily timid mindset are inconsistent with the national vision of the Greater Bay Area innovation and technology hub or the Chief Executive’s policy directive. On the other hand, the impending headlong plunge into Hong Kong’s own version of Genomics England called the “Hong Kong Genome Project” deserves greater scrutiny. In particular, the ownership and governance structure, business model and relationships with local scientists and academics require better communication so that a 360-win consensus may truly emerge, lest we relearn the lessons of our UK counterpart. Singapore is similarly going through much the same thinking process and has been advised to pay greater attention to these very areas by their own overseas high-level experts. With the official promulgation of Government’s Health@InnoHK application guidelines last month, we are finalising our first batch of submissions focusing on our core strengths of emerging infectious diseases, cancer, and stem cell biology. Indeed the Chief Executive declared that the signing of our collaborative agreement with Institut Pasteur for Health@InnoHK was the highlight of her European duty visit this summer. Each of the supported hubs, comprising leading international institutions and local partners, will receive about HKD400M over five years and be allocated laboratory space at Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (HKSTP) to push the frontiers of medical science. We are also partnering with Science Park to develop Hong Kong’s first stem cell GMP labs. While a more substantial facility will become a central platform at HKSTP eventually, we have already begun works commissioning our own lab on Sassoon Road that can produce advanced therapeutic agents for clinical trials, pioneer different forms of cell-based therapies and train the next generation of technical experts for Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area. Finally, I am pleased to report that two excellent labs to study infectious pathogens, namely the new Block T Biosafety Level 3 facility in Queen Mary Hospital and the Shantou University-HKU Joint Institute of Virology in Shantou, commenced operations during the summer. Teaching and Learning We are a university, not a technical institute. And to doctor is to teach. Therefore we put huge emphasis on whom, what and how we educate. Let me start with the first “w” – whom. One of the very first things I did when I became dean was to look at this question. In fact I had been increasingly concerned by the potentially more sluggish upward mobility afforded by higher education. Medicine being the most desirable programme bears an outsized responsibility to do right by the less privileged students in society, while producing doctors of the highest calibre. We therefore launched the Springboard scholarship scheme and undertook to reserve at least 75% of available places to those from the JUPAS track or more precisely students who have completed the local diploma of secondary education or DSE. Disappointingly no other degree course had done this in the past nor followed our lead. We had been highly successful year after year since in capturing the best students and admitting 70-plus percent of DSE candidates, until this summer. We were only able to fill half of the 235 places with JUPAS applicants, although reassuringly we continued to admit those with superlative grades that are two “stars” higher than our sister programme over the other side of the Lion Rock. We, rather I was pilloried in the media for apparently having gone back on my word. I chose to stay silent while the storm in a teacup whirled. My job as dean is to protect the academic environment from political headwinds. The truth was that we had actually offered more than 80% of the total available places to JUPAS candidates. Why would any aspiring student not take up an offer from one of the top three medical schools in Asia? The reasons I surmise are two-fold. For students on the borderline of the admission threshold, they would rather opt for the security of an alternative offer by ranking