Xiang Zhang is the 16th President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, taking office in July 2018. The President's Office records that he was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu, and credits his parents with placing discovery and divergent thinking at the centre of his learning. He studied at Nanjing University for his bachelor's and master's degrees, then moved to the United States for a master's at the University of Minnesota and a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught as an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University and as associate and full professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, before returning to Berkeley in 2004 as the inaugural Edward S. Kuh Endowed Chair Professor, director of the National Science Foundation Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, and director of the materials science division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His work spans nanophotonics and materials physics. The university records that he developed the first optical superlens, breaking the diffraction limit; pioneered plasmonic lithography, with important implications for microelectronics and data storage; and invented the world's first optical invisibility cloak, which was named among TIME's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2008 alongside NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander and China's first spacewalk. He has published more than 420 journal papers, over 100 of them in the Science and Nature family, and has given more than 400 keynote, plenary and invited talks. His honours include the Fitzroy Medal, the Julius Springer Prize, the Max Born Award and the Eringen Medal, and he is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Academia Sinica. The President's Office quotes him describing his role not only as President and Vice-Chancellor but as a mentor, colleague and friend, and expressing a commitment to an intellectually vibrant HKU grounded in curiosity, critical thinking and compassionate values.
Achievements
- 2008 · His optical invisibility cloak was named among TIME's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries
- 2018 · Became the 16th President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong