CUHK and University of Exeter pledge to tackle environment and health issues together

In November 2017, Prof. Sir Steve Smith, Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of UK’s University of Exeter (Exeter) led a delegation to CUHK to discuss a proposed joint centre on environmental sustainability and resilience. Leveraging on the common interests and complementary strengths of the two universities, the joint centre aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines to embark on large and impactful interdisciplinary collaborations to tackle emerging issues related to human health and wellbeing, and ecological impacts in a changing environment (e.g. climate change, air and water pollution, land degradation). A Letter of Intent was signed between the Vice-Chancellors to fuel the planning of this exciting endeavour.

Exeter is a public research university in the southwest of England, UK. It is a member of the Russell Group, formed by leading research universities in the UK. CUHK and Exeter share similar academic aspirations and have complementary research strengths in environment, climate and health. The two universities desire to pursue a long-term partnership that would increase the visibility and impact of their research.

Besides the proposed joint centre, CUHK has also partnered with Exeter for the first in a series of international roll-outs of Exeter’s large-scale PROTECT Project, which aims to understand how the brain ages and investigates factors in mid-life that affect the risk of dementia through an online platform. The study in Hong Kong targets to recruit 500 local participants in its first phase, joining a 25,000-people cohort in the UK. For more information, please click here.