Academics
The eight faculties and their department programmes, state key laboratories and landmark research breakthroughs, and the Faculty of Medicine with its teaching hospitals.
01 Academics Faculties · Departments · Programmes
8 articlesAn overview and in-depth profile of all eight faculties, every department, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, and the academic and general-education system.
Eight Faculties of CUHK: An Overview and In-Depth Profiles
CUHK was founded in 1963, and all its academic units sit within eight faculties (plus a Graduate School established in 1966 as Hong Kong's first). This article opens with a quick-reference table of the eight faculties × Graduate School (founding year/Dean/positioning), then profiles each faculty in depth; only Arts, Science and Social Science date from the University's founding, while Business (1974), Medicine (1981), Engineering (1991) and Law (elevated 2008) all came later.
Complete list of departments, schools and teaching units at CUHK
Lists every department, School and teaching unit under CUHK's eight faculties (about 61 departments in total), explains the organisational levels and how the headcount is arrived at, and traces the recent restructurings: the absorption of the Department of Government and Public Administration into the School of Governance, and the founding of Shing-Tung Yau's Zhizhen School.
The Faculty of Education and Teacher Training: From a School of Education to the Cradle of Hong Kong's Teachers
CUHK's Faculty of Education began as the School of Education founded in 1965, which then offered only a one-year Diploma in Education; it launched its first part-time degree in 1988 and was elevated to Faculty status in the 1991/92 academic year. This article unpacks its four-department-plus-Physical Education Unit structure, the two teaching routes via the PGDE and BEd, and its place within Hong Kong's teacher registration regime.
Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programmes at CUHK
A three-layer guide to more than 380 programmes across CUHK's eight Faculties: JUPAS broad-based admission with minors and double majors, emerging programmes in AI and FinTech, the Graduate School's Articulated MPhil-PhD and the HKPFS fellowship, and the twin-track LLB/JD path to PCLL qualification.
CUHK Academic Structure, Credit-Unit System and General Education
An overview of CUHK's four-year "3-3-4" undergraduate structure, the flexible credit-unit system of about 123 units, the two-semester study rhythm, General Education and University Core Requirements, bilingual/trilingual language requirements, and the A–F grading, GPA and honours thresholds.
CUHK Medicine Admissions: 300 Places on the Six-Year MBChB and the New Four-Year GET Route
The CUHK Faculty of Medicine has grown from a skeleton of 19 teaching units into a comprehensive system spanning Western medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, biomedical sciences and Chinese medicine; GPS has topped Hong Kong admissions scores for 11 consecutive years, and the 2026 QS ranking places it in the global top 1%. This article focuses on structure, curricular evolution and ranking competitiveness, complementing the Module 11 hospital histories.
Distinctive Departments — Translation, Music, Architecture and Chinese Medicine
The Research Centre for Translation (1971), the Department of Translation (1972) and Renditions (1973) — three years, three institutions; the Department of Music has been Hong Kong's first music department since 1965; the School of Architecture was founded by a planner from Boston's Chinatown; and the School of Chinese Medicine completed its cross-faculty move in 2013. This page reconstructs the founding details and the personalities behind each of the four distinctive units.
The Founding of the Faculty of Law: Hong Kong's Third Law School in 2004 and the JD/PCLL System
Hong Kong had only two law schools for more than three decades; in May 2004 CUHK announced it would add a third, built a School in one year beside a Central construction site, began teaching in 2006, and secured faculty status plus PCLL authorisation in 2008. This article investigates the founding history and the position of the Faculty within the professional-qualification system.
04 Research Labs · Breakthroughs · Startups
9 articlesState key laboratories, landmark breakthroughs (NIPT / optical fibre / network coding), robotics, named research centres and spin-off companies.
CUHK Research at a Glance: Five Milestones, National Platforms and a Timeline of Breakthroughs
CUHK's five most internationally visible research breakthroughs span medicine, physics, information theory, AI and agriculture — two of them leading to the Nobel Prize and the Lasker Award respectively. Add a Nobel laureate visiting professor, members of the national academies and Academia Europaea, national platforms, AoE funding and global citation standing, and this article is a master map of "research at its strongest".
CUHK's Research Architecture: State Key Laboratories, InnoHK Centres and University-level Institutes
CUHK's research units span three tiers — national (six State Key Laboratories, approved between 2006 and 2025), SAR flagship (six InnoHK centres, roughly one-fifth of Hong Kong's 28), and university/faculty-level institutes — together the institutional embodiment of CUHK's dual identity as a university that faces both the world and the nation.
Life Sciences and Medical Breakthroughs: The Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, NIPT and the Front Lines of Two Pandemics
With the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences as its axis, this article threads together the Faculty of Medicine's world-class achievements: NIPT's "finding fetal DNA in plasma," nasopharyngeal and multi-cancer early screening, digestive diseases and the gut microbiome, frontline experience of SARS and COVID-19, and the Lasker Award, Breakthrough Prize and academician honours.
Information and Engineering Breakthroughs: Network Coding, the Shannon Award, and the Journey from the Multimedia Laboratory to SenseTime
Two high-water marks in CUHK engineering research: one is network coding, which "rewrote the logical layer of network communications" (2022 Shannon Award); the other is deep learning and SenseTime, which "directly incubated laboratory breakthroughs into industry". The former is an original new theoretical field; the latter a paradigm of academia-industry integration.
Medical and Multi-Scale Robotics: The Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center, Endoscopic Surgery and Intercontinental Telesurgery
Medical robotics is the most visible "engineering × medicine" intersection at CUHK: from MRC, Asia's first one-stop R&D platform for surgical robots, to an intercontinental telesurgery spanning 20,000 km, to surgical automation on live animals, and to intravascular micro/nanorobot swarms — with scales ranging from centimetres down to microns and nanometres.
Agricultural Biotechnology: The State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, Salt-Tolerant Soybeans, and the Journey from Gene to Gansu's Saline-Alkali Soils
A soybean that grows in saline-alkali soil turned deep gene science into farmers' harvests. This article traces the full chain: from the wild soybean salt-tolerance gene GmCHX1 and the first reference-grade genome, to Gansu's saline-alkali fields, space experiments, and international policy advocacy.
Research Output, Naming Structures and Knowledge Transfer: From Endowed Chairs to Unicorn Spin-offs
From funding and reviews to endowed chairs, incubation systems and spin-off companies, an account of the "structures and output" of CUHK research: AoE/TRS grants, RAE engineering leadership, the Nobel/Lasker/Shannon threads, and 131 spin-offs including the unicorns SenseTime, SmartMore, Cornerstone and Insighta.
State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology: From Samuel Sun's Lysine-Rich Rice to Lam Hon-Ming's Soybean Genes
One national-level laboratory, two generations of directors. Samuel Sun raised essential amino acids in seed protein by thirty per cent and launched the Gates-funded lysine-rich rice project; Lam Hon-Ming took over and shifted toward soybean and rice disease resistance. This article takes "people" and "institutions" as its two axes, tracing this partner laboratory's skeleton from its 2008 founding to its 2025 reorganisation and renaming.
Chinese Studies, Social Science Think Tanks, Earth and Space: the Art Museum, USC Special Collection, Opinion Polls and the First CUHK Satellite
A single article on CUHK's research strengths in the humanities and social sciences: the Institute of Chinese Studies and the USC Collection, HKIAPS opinion polls and CCPOS media surveys, the Quality of Life Index, and ISEIS's satellite ground station with the two CUHK satellites.
11 Medicine Faculty · Hospitals · Chinese Medicine
6 articlesThe Faculty of Medicine's structure and clinical departments, the Prince of Wales Hospital and CUHK Medical Centre, and the School of Chinese Medicine and its research.
CUHK Faculty of Medicine — Structure, Teaching Hospitals and Research Strengths
The CUHK Faculty of Medicine comprises five Schools and fourteen clinical/basic science departments, with the Prince of Wales Hospital as its principal teaching hospital and a second, private teaching hospital co-funded by the Jockey Club and government opened in 2021. This article covers its structure, admissions and curriculum, rankings, and teaching hospital system.
Prince of Wales Hospital and the 2003 SARS Outbreak: A Clinical History of CUHK's Teaching Hospital
A pneumonia patient admitted to Ward 8A on 4 March, a jet nebulizer, eighteen healthcare workers down within ten days — how Prince of Wales Hospital went from a Sha Tin teaching hospital to one of the earliest sites where the world came to understand how SARS spreads inside a hospital, reconstructed item by item from academic and official sources.
School of Chinese Medicine: Among Hong Kong's First Degree Programmes in Chinese Medicine (1998), Standing Side-by-Side with Western Medicine
From a "Working Group on Chinese Herbal Medicine" under the Faculty of Science in 1975, to formal establishment as a School in 1998, integration into the Faculty of Medicine in 2013, and the move to Li Wai Chun Building on the Chung Chi campus in 2014 — CUHK's School of Chinese Medicine has come nearly half a century, and has now produced over a thousand graduates; in late 2025 it became a teaching partner of the Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital alongside HKBU and HKU.
The Birth of Hong Kong's Second Medical School: The Founding of the CUHK Faculty of Medicine and Its Founding Dean, Gerald Choa (1977–1981)
A doctor who studied medicine at Cheeloo University amid the upheavals of war and later served as Hong Kong's Director of Medical and Health Services turned, in 1976, to a medical school that did not yet exist — in five years Gerald Choa took Hong Kong's second medical school from a government approval to a building, a teaching hospital, and a graduating cohort, and in his later years wrote the biography of Ho Kai, founder of the "first" medical school.
Jockey Club Institute of Ageing: the 2014 Jockey Club donation and the "age-friendly city" vision
The CUHK Jockey Club Institute of Ageing was founded in 2014 on an HK$12 million Jockey Club donation, with Professor Jean Woo as founding Director and the vision of "making Hong Kong an age-friendly city in the world"; from the AgeWatch Index and city-wide 18-district assessments to a controlled trial reversing frailty, it integrates interdisciplinary research, policy advocacy and community outreach.
The Opening of CUHK Medical Centre: Hong Kong's First Smart Private Teaching Hospital
CUHKMC began partial operations on 6 January 2021 as Hong Kong's first non-profit private teaching hospital and the city's first "smart hospital", with 516 inpatient beds. Wholly owned by The Chinese University of Hong Kong, it reinvests its surpluses in Faculty of Medicine teaching and research, and was built with a HK$1.3 billion Jockey Club donation and an interest-free government loan of about HK$4 billion.