Chairman's Message

The City University of Hong Kong (CityU) is committed to educate the leaders and managers who will contribute to shape the future of our world. To achieve this ambitious goal, it needs to offer to its students the best possible teaching and training. With Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), CityU intends to broaden the scope of the courses delivered by its regular faculty. The IAS invites as Senior Fellows and Visiting Fellows internationally recognized leaders who do their research and teach in areas not always covered by the regular syllabus of the various departments of the University. The IAS fellows are given the opportunity to pursue curiosity-driven research and to present the results of their studies to a diverse audience of students, postdocs and researchers coming from CityU and other universities of Hong Kong and Greater China. 

The IAS fellows work in a wide spectrum of disciplines including mathematics, physics, chemistry, materials science and biology, both in their fundamental and applied aspects. By the courses, the lectures, workshops and seminars it organizes, the IAS has the ambition to convey the excitement of research to the academic world and beyond, to the society at large. It is indeed more than ever essential to spread the values of scientific knowledge, at a time when humanity faces many challenges that only science can solve. 

When inaugurating the IAS a couple of years ago, the CityU management had in mind the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study whose goal is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Like its famous model, the IAS wants to be a place of specialized research, but also to provide an atmosphere open to intellectual exchange across disciplinary fields. Like the other institutes founded in the world to follow the Princeton model, the IAS does not charge tuitions and does not deliver grades and diplomas, nor does it have large laboratories. It operates in symbiosis with its founding University and constitutes so to speak the window of CityU opened to the world. 

It has been an honour for me to become an IAS fellow two years ago and its Chairman this year. I am particularly pleased of this appointment because I am coming from an institution which shares the IAS values. One cannot say however that the Collège de France in Paris has been created to follow the Princeton’s example. It has indeed been founded in 1530, four hundred years before its American counterpart and will celebrate soon its half-millennium. Its Latin motto is “Docet Omnia” which means “It teaches everything”. It carries forward the spiritual and intellectual values of the Renaissance and of the Enlightenment, the same values which are supported by the Princeton Institute and the other institutions following its model throughout the world. The IAS of CityU has its place in this consortium of excellence. I am proud to be its Chairman and I am looking forward to participating in many exciting events sponsored by the IAS in the years to come.  
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Professor Serge Haroche
Chairman of the IAS
Emeritus Professor at Collège de France
Nobel Laureate in Physics (2012)