Donor
Ir Tsui Tack-kong
Ir Tsui Tack-kong, Founder and Managing Director of T.K. Tsui & Associates Limited, is an authorised person, a registered structural engineer and a geotechnical engineer, who has over 60 years of experience in the construction field. Ir Tsui graduated from the Hong Kong Technical College, the predecessor of PolyU, with a Diploma in Building in 1959. He then pursued further study and received graduate training in the United Kingdom. He was the first Joint Chairman of Hong Kong Branch of The Institution of Structural Engineers (UK)/Structural Division of The Hong Kong Institute of Engineers in 1979 and was a Council Member of The Hong Kong Institute of Engineers in the early 1980s.
With regard to his charity work, Ir Tsui was a Director of Pok Oi Hospital and Yan Oi Tong in 1975 and 1985 respectively, and has served as Honourable Consultant to many non-profit making organisations. With a commitment to nurturing the younger generation, since 2003 he has made generous donations to build four primary schools and a library complex for a technical college in the remote areas of Guizhou province in the Chinese Mainland. He has also sponsored students to further their education at universities.
Ir Tsui has staunchly supported his alma mater over the years. He is a Founding Member of the PolyU Development Foundation and also a Senior Advisor for the President on several major campus development projects. He was presented with the Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award in 2011 and conferred University Fellowship in 2013. He also served the Board of Directors of the Outstanding PolyU Alumni Association in 2018.
Appointee
Dr Zhou Chao
Dr Zhou Chao, Assistant Professor of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of PolyU, earned his bachelor's degree in hydraulic engineering from Tsinghua University in 2009, and his PhD degree in geotechnical engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2014. Before joining the PolyU family, he was a research assistant professor at HKUST from 2014 to 2018.
Dr Zhou’s research interests include the thermo-hydro-mechanical behaviour of unsaturated soils, theoretical constitutive modelling and numerical modelling of soils, aiming at improving the safety and performance of infrastructures especially for pavements and pile foundations. He has published over a hundred of papers with more than 60 Science Citation Index papers contributing to high-impact international journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macau), a prominent funding scheme under the Natural Science Foundation of China for supporting young scientists with demonstrated achievements to conduct research in areas of their own expertise.His excellent contribution to the scientific world is also recognised and awarded with a number of prestigious awards, including the State Natural Science Award (Second Class) by the State Council of China, and the Bright Spark Lecture Award by the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE). Currently, Dr Zhou serves in several professional bodies such as ISSMGE and the editorial boards of top international journals in Civil Engineering, such as Canadian Geotechnical Journal.
