Research Strategy

Aspiring to be a leading, research-led, liberal arts University in Asia, Hong Kong Baptist University is committed to conducting world-leading investigations that extends the frontiers of knowledge, tackles global challenges and benefits the community at home and abroad. 

Pursuing research excellence is one of the priorities of the University’s Institutional Strategic Plan 2018-2028. The University keeps enhancing its capacity and strength to produce world-class research with an aim to bring significant impact to the society. The University will achieve this by:

• developing clusters of strength to maximise knowledge outputs and impact 
• establishing university wide research labs to focus resources on strategic clusters 
• building up research human capacity as well as broaden and deepen research training 
• enhancing the learning experiences of scholars and postgraduate students 
• supporting diverse approaches to scholarship 
• addressing community needs through applied research 
• developing research collaborations with strategic partners around the world 
• producing new knowledge that improves people’s lives

Strategic Clusters of Strengths

Encompassing HKBU’s research strengths, the University has identified three strategic clusters to enhance the University’s research coherence and foster the alliances of research strengths.

Creative Media/Practice

Health and Drug Discovery

Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence

University-wide Interdisciplinary Research Labs

To organise cross faculty research along the directions of three strategic clusters, the University has formed 6 research Labs to underpin  interdisciplinary and theme-based research, for promoting research excellence and knowledge/technology transfer, and for attracting global collaboration.

Each laboratory aims to be a world class research hub for vibrant intellectual interactions where researchers and collaborators can explore and discover novel solutions for grand challenges in the following focused themes:

1. Augmented Creativity Laboratory: augmenting human creativity with artificial intelligence and human-machine collaboration
2. Computational Medicine Laboratory: data driven innovation on therapeutics and new drug discovery
3. System Health Laboratory: behavioural and wellbeing functioning mechanisms of complex systems including life, environment, human society and web media
4. Smart Society Laboratory: smart decision making in social policies and organisation
5. Data Economy Laboratory: new theories, business practices and new technologies in today’s networked economy with data assets
6. Ethical and Theoretical AI Laboratory: basic theories of ethical artificial intelligence, with a particular emphasis on machine behaviour studies, as well as central issues in AI verifiability and AI interpretability

Faculty Niche Research Areas

In addition to the University-wide Interdisciplinary Research Clusters, each Faculty embraces their own niche research areas to increase the overall research capacity of the University: