HKUST unveils three new faces

A man investigating the possibility of an invisibility cloak, one who invented the screen millions of people carry around in their pockets, and a nobel laureate joined the University of Science and Technology yesterday as the first named professors of the Jockey Club Institute of Advanced Study.

Mathematician Gunther Uhlmann, Hong Kong-born inventor of the organic light-emitting diode screen and technology Ching Tang and economist Sir Christopher Pissarides are the newest faces at the eight-year-old research institute which inaugurated its new building yesterday.

"We hope their appointment will draw more people of calibre," centre director Professor Henry Tye Sze-hoi said.

Like its namesakes overseas, the institute, founded in 2006, looks to "draw the greatest minds" to "work on the foremost intellectual problems of our times", university president Tony Chan Fan-cheong said.

The first such institute, founded at Princeton University in 1930, hosted the likes of Albert Einstein and worked on theoretical problems. The HKUST institute has no direct affiliation with Princeton's and will focus more on experimental and applied research. But Chan said it also wanted to build a curiosity-driven community and encourage research.

"Change always stimulates more thought," said the 65-year-old Pissarides, who specialises in labour and unemployment issues and jointly won the 2010 Nobel for economics.