Leading projects on geotechnical breakthroughs and technologies to support future wireless communication saw School of Engineering scholars collect two out of three top science and technology honors awarded to HKUST by the Ministry of Education.

The Awards for Research Excellence in Natural Sciences 2011, announced in March 2012, extend across all tertiary institutions in China and provide further national recognition of the distinguished work being carried out by HKUST researchers.

A First Class award in Natural Sciences went to Prof Limin Zhang and Prof Wilson Tang (deceased), Civil and Environmental Engineering, for their ground-breaking work on reliability analysis and risk control for geotechnical structures in hydraulic engineering. The research has been successfully applied in the design of large hydropower projects in Sichuan and landslide risk mitigation in Hong Kong.

In addition, Prof Qian Zhang, Computer Science and Engineering, received a Second Class award in Natural Sciences for her significant basic research on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless communications. OFDM is set to be one of the core technologies for wireless communications in the years ahead. Prof Zhang worked with collaborators from several top mainland universities to discover ways to overcome defects in existing static spectrum management and improve utilization efficiency.

Another Second Class award went to academics in the Division of Life Science for their systematic analysis of traditional Chinese medicine formulas.