PolyU nominated Ir Dr Wallace Lai (LSGI), Dr Henry Chan (COMP) and a teaching team led by Dr CL Mak (AP) for the 2017 UGC Teaching Award. All of them have shown excellence in using innovations in teaching to improve students' learning experiences and outcomes. The impact that they have made is across different sectors and communities.
We are very proud that Ir Dr Wallace Lai was shortlisted for the Award in the Early Career Faculty Members category.
Ir Dr Wallace Lai, shortlisted finalist of the 2017 UGC Teaching Award (Early Career Faculty Members)
Ir Dr Wallace Lai, demonstrating to the students
A Leading Educator in the Emerging Field of Utility Management and Surveying
A dedicated researcher, Dr Wallace Lai is also an innovator in curricular design, laboratory spaces and their pedagogical interaction. He is deeply committed to his students’ learning. His educational design of their learning experiences reflects this commitment. Although he is only in his fifth year at PolyU, Dr Lai has established himself in a relatively new curriculum in the emerging programme specialism of Utility Management and Surveying (UMS). After taking leadership of the UMS programme upon his arrival, Dr Lai redesigned the curriculum in an interdisciplinary manner to provide training and tutelage for students, who will need to confront real-world problems in the field of underground utilities. To implement the new curriculum, Dr Lai designed a unique, fit-for-purpose laboratory, the Underground Utility Survey Laboratory (UUS Lab), which is both configurable and scalable to real-life scenario modelling and serves as a classroom for training students to see the unseen. Seeing the unseen is Dr Lai’s motto and accurately describes how students are forced to undergo trial by fire in the laboratory and think like young professionals working in the field. The UUS Lab is the first of its kind. It has received visitors from both nearby and international universities. The College of Surveying and Geo-informatics at Tongji University has modelled its own laboratory after Dr Lai’s original configuration. Dr Lai chaired the 16th International Conference of Ground Penetrating Radar in 2016, an event with over 200 participants from 29 countries, in which his students took the lead in planning, organising and hosting.
