My teaching
Course development
CHEM2073 EPIC: Entrepreneurship Programme In Chemistry
(Lectures: 26 hrs, tutorials: 13 hrs)
Entrepreneurial activities are a crucial engine that drives innovation and economic growth. This course intends to develop innovation mindsets and attitudes in chemistry students, and teach them the theoretical and practical knowledge in scientific and/or technological entrepreneurship. We aim to empower students to develop the mentality of technology entrepreneurship, as well as to introduce the key steps for founding new technology-based firms in the field of chemistry and related scientific and engineering disciplines. Knowledge in communication necessary in technical entrepreneurship, ranging from the format and language used in patents to storytelling skills in business meetings, will be introduced. Unlike other entrepreneurship programmes, this course focuses on the development of chemistry-related business ideas, and intends to act as a compass that guides the students to choose the topics and areas of chemistry they wish to specialise in before graduation. It prepares students to use what they will learn in their undergraduate programme to solve real-life problems with commercialisation potentials. This revolutionary course is a requisite for the BSc (Chemistry) programme, making CityU the first university in Asia to equip all chemistry graduates with basic entrepreneurship skills.
GE2322 The Nobel Spirit
(Lectures: 39 hrs, tutorials: 13 hrs)
This course aims to inspire the students to discover the link between human achievements at the highest level and their personal lives. At one level, by citing the Nobel Prizes, the students will learn the multi-disciplinary nature of human endeavours. At another level, we aim to use the selection of Nobel Prize laureates to illustrate how human endeavours are evaluated. Our objective is to stimulate the students to question the process of judging human achievements. In this course, students will be guided to perform a number of activities, including the live campus shows of the announcement of the latest Nobel Prizes, election of the most significant Nobel Prizes in the history, voting for one question to ask a real Nobel winner, and the selection of one human achievement worthy of a Nobel Prize. Through these activities, students will learn the spirit of the Nobel Prize as an award for human achievements at the highest level.
GE1311 Death: A Discovery Approach
(Lectures: 39 hrs, tutorials: 13 hrs)
Featured in Citylink, the CityU magazine
There is one thing I am sure about: we are all going to die. But given the certainty of death, it is sometimes surprising how much of a taboo it is in our society. In his most famous book "On the shortness of life", Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca writes that one's life philosophy is dictated by his view on death. This course aims to introduce students with the ways in which different academic disciplines view and study death, mortality, aging and the afterlife. In this course, students will approach Death from 4 various perspectives:, including political, scientific, cultural and legal. The overarching objective of this course is to inspire, using death as an example, the students to examine and evaluate other fundamental life questions using the approaches introduced by this course. This course is a useful way to start a young person’s university life, as it illustrates how academic methodologies can be used to provide the conceptual framework for dealing with some of the most fundamental events in his/her life.
CHEM4064 Biological techniques and instrumentation
(Lectures: 39 hrs, Tutorial: 26 hrs, Lab: 52 hrs)
Winner: CityU innovative teaching award, 2020
This course is about the interplay between techniques, discoveries and ideas in the progress of science. Through taking part in this course, the students will:
- Acquire knowledge on the history of development and the working principles of a selection of modern biological techniques.
- Examine how advances in biological sciences have ALWAYS been made possible by technical breakthroughs.
- Critically evaluate the roles of creativity and innovation in the invention of biological techniques.
- Develop the abilities to critically evaluate newly invented biological techniques they encounter in the literature and to apply these new techniques in realistic research situations.
- Develop the skills in original thinking, teamwork and presentation.
CSCI2002 - Workshop on Research Methodology
(Lectures: 13 hrs, tutorials: 13 hrs)
The course is designed for students enrolled in the Global Research & Entrepreneurship Enrichment programme stream of College of Science to train them in acquiring the necessary skills of practicing research scientists.
CSCI3001 - Grand Challenges in the World
(Developed on behalf of College of Science)
This experiential and integrated course, designed for Year 3 or Year 4 CSCI undergraduate students (Year 2 students with CGPA 3.00 or above will also be considered), aims to: (1) systematically guide students to integrate the content of different courses across the semesters into a coherent body of knowledge, and then (2) apply this body of knowledge to solve real-world problems, with an emphasis on leadership and teamwork training. Students will learn research methodologies and design thinking through case-studies of published papers, past proposals, competition entries or entrepreneurial ideas on real-world problems, before identifying their own research questions. They will then conduct a small research project in an attempt to provide scientific or technical solutions to these problems. Given the complex nature of real-world problems, students will be encouraged to build multi-disciplinary teams for these research projects. Using a student-centred pedagogy, this course combines project-based learning with course integration, interdisciplinary connections, teamwork and communication.