PolyU congratulates our academics in winning in two categories of the University Grants Committee (UGC) Teaching Awards for 2022. Dr Tulio Maximo, Assistant Professor from the School of Design, was selected as the awardee for the Early Career Faculty Members category; and the English Across the Curriculum (EAC) team, led by PolyU scholar Dr Julia Chen, Director of the Education Development Centre, won the award in the Collaborative Teams category.

The Early Career Faculty Member award acknowledges those with exceptional achievements in the nascent stages of their academic career. With a passion to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in the community, Dr Maximo created the “Design Meets Disabilities” subject, which focuses on integrating more inclusive design concepts into the design programme curriculum, and effectively applying an empathic approach in guiding students to design more user-friendly products, especially for people with disabilities.

Spearheaded by PolyU, the winner of the UGC Collaborative Team Teaching Award 2021-22 is the EAC team that includes experienced educators from City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The team’s EAC initiatives complement standalone English courses and have two main features: offering students from across different disciplines timely, tailor-made and targeted English learning materials; and creating synergy and opportunities for collaborations between English language and discipline subject teachers. To date, the EAC team’s work has impacted over 30 departments, 60 courses, 100 teachers and 10,000 students.