Professor Zhang Ge

While highly-acclaimed as a scholar and researcher himself, Professor Zhang Ge has consistently demonstrated his huge enthusiasm for supervising research postgraduates as well as undergraduates and taught Master’s students in their honours projects and his students winning numerous awards and titles is the best proof of his competence and high standards in that field of academic endeavour in research supervision.

Professor Zhang has been successful in bringing out the best in his research students, who have been admirable both in quantity and quality. Since 2013, he has supervised 15 Postdoctoral Research Fellows/Staff, eight PhD students, five MPhil students, four Master’s students, 14 undergraduates and co-supervised four PhD candidates.

With a keen eye for talent, Professor Zhang has assembled a top-rated research team comprising four Research Assistant Professors, four Post-doctoral Research Fellows, seven Research Postgraduate students and five Research Assistants. Among them are three Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme recruits.

As a supervisor, Professor Zhang has amply demonstrated his capability to lead and motivate his team to work towards a common goal and at the same time allow room for individual growth and development. By inspiring excellent teamwork and great team spirit among his researchers, Professor Zhang has been able to produce an impressive quantity of impactful research work.

Under the guidance of Professor Zhang, two Postdoctoral Research Fellows and seven research postgraduates have won more than 25 research-related awards between 2013 and 2018, including one student whose project was chosen on aboard on China’s spacecraft Tianzhou-1 to conduct space life research. This represented an enormous boost to the prestige of the researchers, to the School of Chinese Medicine and to the University, which was the only higher education institution outside of the Mainland to conduct a research project on board Tianzhou-1, China’s first cargo spacecraft. It was an achievement that every scientist dreams about.

Professor Zhang has also made considerable efforts to enrich students’ learning experience by engaging them in research and other creative activities, thereby inspiring innovation in students and developing their interest in pursuing graduate studies.

Under his supervision, four undergraduates majoring in Chinese Medicine and Biomedical Science entered the 2016 International Bio-molecular Design Competition held in the U.S. and won the Gold Project Award and 2nd place in the video competition. They won with their innovative research proposal for Chinese medicine entitled A smart anti-tumour, nucleolin aptamer-paclitaxel conjugate. It was the University’s best result in that competition.

Professor Zhang’s skills in building and inspiring research teams to scale new heights of achievement are a model for others to follow. He is therefore undoubtedly worthy of the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance as Research Supervisor.