Faculty Teaching Award Scheme 2023-24
Delivering quality education to nurture future leaders is an integral part of the Faculty’s mission. Every year, the Faculty recognises teachers with outstanding achievements and significant contributions in teaching and student learning through the Faculty Teaching Award Scheme. The award-winners for the academic year 2023-24 are:
Professor Jiang BIAN
Assistant Professor
“I am deeply honored to receive the Faculty Outstanding Teaching Award (Undergraduate Teaching) this year. Teaching has been a driving passion in my career, where I strive to create a learner-centered environment that encourages students to engage actively and think critically. Through interactive discussions, case analyses, and engagement with industry practitioners, I aim to empower students to tackle complex real-world challenges and make meaningful impact in their fields. This award reflects the shared efforts and collaborative spirits of my students, colleagues, and mentors, from whom I continue to draw inspiration. I am grateful and excited to keep growing as both an educator and a lifelong learner.”
Professor Wing Tung LAM
Assistant Professor
“I am honored to receive the Faculty Outstanding Teacher Award. I believe everyone should gain from a course, despite differences in preparation and learning profiles. I redesigned the compulsory course Intermediate Microeconomics to help students connect mathematics, diagrams, and economic intuition, and gradually familiarize with mathematical models. I teach with rigor while scaffolding in various ways. I modify many question formats to reduce the computation burden significantly. I revamp the assessments so that students can demonstrate their knowledge through a verbal explanation, an informative diagram or a mathematical argument. I continuously take note of the common obstacles and improve my teaching materials accordingly.”
Professor Feng TIAN
Assistant Professor
“I am deeply honored to receive this award. By creating a student-centered learning environment and combining case studies with real-world applications, I aim to help students acquire the tools they need to master. The encouragement and feedback from my students have been invaluable in refining my approach and reaffirming the value of a relaxed yet engaging teaching style.
Patience and a supportive atmosphere remain central to my teaching philosophy. This award is a testament to the collective contributions of my students, teaching assistants, and colleagues, who inspire me every day. I am excited to continue improving students’ learning experiences and supporting their growth.”
Professor Mengzhou ZHUANG
Assistant Professor
“I am deeply honored to receive the Faculty Outstanding Teaching Award at the undergraduate level. My teaching philosophy was built around connecting complex marketing concepts with real-life examples that students encounter daily, making learning both relatable and impactful. I also emphasize hands-on learning by all kinds of in-class interactive activities, such as storytelling and live experiments, allowing students to experience and understand marketing in person. Additionally, I believe in the power of effective communication and providing timely feedback to support and guide students throughout their academic journey. This award inspires me to continue enhancing my methods and fostering an engaging and supportive learning environment.”
Professor Alex CHAN
Associate Professor of Teaching
“Postgraduate students typically come from diverse educational backgrounds and possess substantial work experience. Each student has unique strengths, needs, and career aspirations. I strive to recognize and understand each student’s learning progress and needs. A thorough understanding of students is essential for a teacher to provide personalized support and encouragement, enhancing their learning interests and commitment. Building relationships with students based on mutual respect and trust is the foundation for creating an effective teaching and learning environment. This approach guides students through a rewarding learning journey, helping them achieve their career goals.”
Professor Michael CHAU
Professor
“It is my great honor to receive the Faculty Outstanding Teaching Award this year. Teaching is an important part of my academic career. I enjoy teaching and seeing students grow in their knowledge and maturity, and become successful in their career and life. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to teach and interact with thousands of high-quality students at the University of Hong Kong over the years and I have learned and gained a lot myself along the journey.”
Professor Jinzhao DU
Assistant Professor
“As both a researcher and an educator, I aim to bridge the gap between academic research and practical application by making the latest knowledge readily accessible to students. I constantly update my teaching materials to incorporate the most up-to-date academic research. In addition, I provide students with current examples, relevant case studies, and actual data for analysis to facilitate knowledge internalization. This approach greatly enhances students’ involvement, which is a key determinant of my course’s success. By guiding students to explore and discover knowledge, I achieve significantly better learning outcomes than by merely allowing them to passively absorb information.”
Professor Rujiing MENG
Associate Professor of Teaching
“I love teaching and cherish the opportunity to interact with our talented students. As to teaching philosophy, I deeply believe in the importance of teachers’ passion in teaching and adopt student-centered approach to course and programme design in helping students achieve meaningful learning outcomes.
I am glad to make a difference in students’ learning. A student commented, “Professor Meng’s course was very interesting, who gave a lot of examples to help us understand. And in the process, this course has expanded my international perspective and inspired me to give speeches on stage. I really like Prof Meng!” I will strive to continue making a positive impact on the students’ learning and life.”
Professor Christina NG
Associate Professor of Teaching
“I am honoured to receive the Faculty Outstanding Teacher Award (Postgraduate Teaching), after receiving the accolade last year for the Undergraduate Teaching. I am grateful that my dedications are recognized not only by the Faculty and undergraduates, but also my postgraduate students with diverse academic and cultural backgrounds, job aspirations and work experiences.
It has been my privilege to teach and share my experience with my students for almost three decades, who are from the top accounting and business programmes in Hong Kong. I am always eager to share my knowledge and insights with my students, who will be our business leaders in the future, and empower them with up-to-date knowledge and practical skills.
It has always been rewarding and motivating to inspire and witness my students to grow and succeed in the accounting, legal and business fields. I will adhere to my teaching philosophy and keep up with my momentum to deliver quality teachings.”
Professor Weiming ZHU
Associate Professor
“My approach to teaching is emphasize critical thinking through discussing latest practices and up-to-date knowledge in an interactive learning environment. When designing the MBA course “Business Analytics for Managers,” I recognize that balancing essential data concepts with practical relevance is key, as most students are managers who won’t be coding daily but need to understand data analytics’ objectives and power. Therefore, each class begins with a real-world business problem, such as designing mobile games with A/B testing or predicting wine auction prices. I also use examples from media and reports to underscore the importance and common errors of data analysis. Additionally, I leveraged the university’s free access to GPT-3.5 and taught students how to “program with English.” I introduced how to use prompts effectively to generate usable code without uploading data. This empowers students to combine business acumen with advanced data analytics techniques to make better decisions.”
Professor Jeffrey NG
Professor
“It is my great honour to receive that Faculty Outstanding Teacher Award (Postgraduate Teaching). The award will spur me to work harder to become an even better teacher. I attribute my success to my longstanding efforts to continually improve my courses. In my teaching, I focus on delivering edutainment. I believe that my students learn best if I teach in ways that help them develop their own potential and learning style, as well capture the attention and stimulate their learning interest. I look forward to continuously improving my educational techniques to educate future generations of students and in the process, win more teaching awards.”
Professor Haipeng SHEN
Patrick S C Poon Professor in Analytics and Innovation
Chair of Business Analytics and Innovation
“The opportunity to teach, to me, is a blessing, an opportunity, and a gift. I cannot thank my PhD advisor – Professor Larry Brown – enough for opening the door for me twenty-six years ago. I cannot thank my students enough for making teaching so enjoyable and rewarding for me. There are three principles that I follow dearly in teaching: enjoyment and passion, relevance and application, communication and interaction. Try to impress upon the students your enjoyment and passion about the subject, with enthusiastic attitude, humorous lectures, and active body language. In return, your students will become more active and engaged. Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Make your lectures more relevant and illustrate how to connect with applications. In return, your students will teach you with their real world cases. Everything is about story telling. There are a story teller, a group of story listeners, and the story. Be communicative, be interactive, be humorous, tell a good story!”
Professor Xu LI
Associate Professor
“I am honored to receive the Faculty Outstanding Teacher Award of the IMBA programme. The award suggests that students agree and support my teaching philosophy. I believe that teaching is not only a form of transferring knowledge, but also an opportunity to cultivate students’ self-learning interests and ability. While any given teaching can be a one-time assignment for a teacher, learning is a life-long journey for students. For such a journey, teaching is not the ending, but the beginning of every crucial turn and advancement; therefore, as a teacher, I’d love to help students navigate their journey to the success.”
Professor Bonnie Hayden CHENG
Associate Professor
“Empowering future leaders through education is a privilege. I continuously adapt my teaching to cultivate a dynamic classroom environment that engages and inspires students with diverse learning preferences. My approach to teaching is designed to foster students’ critical thinking and problem-solving while equipping them with the necessary skills to thrive in a rapidly changing global environment. By immersing in innovative methods, students are better equipped to confront real-world challenges, build resilience, and nurture a lifelong love of learning. I am deeply grateful to receive this prestigious award.”
Professor Shan HUANG
Assistant Professor
“It’s my great honor to receive this reward. It has been my aspiration that my teaching will make a significant contribution to my students’ growth, thereby facilitating their future career paths. I believe that teaching innovation is epitomized by providing students with unique learning content that encompasses rare and invaluable knowledge. Such knowledge should have direct applicability to their future academic and professional endeavors, thus conferring upon them a competitive advantage. Moreover, teaching innovation involves the utilization of novel methodologies, including cutting-edge technologies and practical insights, to furnish students with a seamless integration of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. In summary, my goal in teaching is to provide students with a comprehensive learning experience that enables them to become creative individuals capable of solving novel problems.”
Professor Wen ZHOU
Associate Professor
“To allow students to experience the dynamics in economics and game theory, I adopt the interactive game approach by integrating a simulation platform into my course. During my lectures, I conduct approximately 15 to 20 live game sessions, where a student’s payoff typically depends not only on their own choices but also on the choices made by all other players in the group, mirroring real-life scenarios. Although each session is very short, lasting only two or three minutes, the games provide a valuable opportunity for students to experience firsthand the need to accommodate diverse interests while pursuing personal gains. They also appreciate the refreshing break from the usual mode of lecturing and discussion.
The choices made by players reveal a rich array of human characteristics: greed, arrogance, cheating, as well as fairness, generosity, and pragmatism. Many students remark that the most significant lesson they learn is the importance of cooperation for effective strategy. I believe this lesson will not only make them better managers in the future but also more empathetic and caring individuals.”
