In 2005, the University celebrated the inauguration of the first 8 Endowed Professorships,
a milestone in the University's history.
To date, a total of 120 Endowed Professorships have been established.
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Dr Patrick Poon

Patrick S C Poon Professorship in Analytics and Innovation

Analytics and Innovation are the basic drivers for the continuous and sustainable progress of the society of human beings. May HKU continue to lead in the research and teaching of these important factors for a better world.

Dr Patrick Poon
Shen Haipeng

Shen Haipeng

Appointed in 2019
The world is more digital, better connected and smarter than ever before. This rapid increase in digitalisation and connectivity is producing massive amounts of data, which in turn is enabling technological advances, better systems and new innovations.

Central to these developments is big data and how it is being analysed and used by corporations, governments and academics to improve people’s lives. In the health field, this information is used to transform medicine, treatments, and how hospitals are run.

Professor Shen Haipeng is Professor of Innovation and Information Management at the Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong (HKU). He is also the Associate Dean for Executive Education at the Faculty and specialises in using big data to optimise workflows to help improve efficiencies in large
organisations and hospitals.

Professor Shen’s research revolves around the theme of data-driven decision making in the face of uncertainty, and includes fundamental methodological research about the challenges imposed by big data as well as interdisciplinary analytical research in business analytics and precision medicine. He tackles the challenge of how to leverage the breadth and depth of available data, through analytics, to obtain actionable insights from haystacks of “noisy” data to increase the competitive edge and sustainability of operations, and provide better recommendations for decision makers.

As part of his research he is working with physicians, hospitals and clinics so that patients can receive better treatment at a lower cost and hospitals can be run more efficiently. As a result of his research into strokes, which are one of the leading causes of death around the world, his work has led to an improved quality of care for stroke patients and he hopes that these findings will eventually benefit other patients as well in future.

The ultimate goal of his medical research, conducted in association with neurologists and cardiologists, is to create innovative data-driven clinical decision support systems for better management of chronic diseases with the use of analytics. This would leverage multi-modal healthcare data to produce “precision (or personalised) medicine” for patients.

Professor Shen received his PhD in Statistics from The Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania in 2003, and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

He was the inaugural winner of the Faculty Special Contribution Teaching Award in 2018. He founded the Master of Science in Business Analytics programme, and the Executive Master of Business Administration programme (in collaboration with Peking University Guanghua School of Management).

Professor Shen currently serves or has served as Associate Editor for several flagship journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Management Science, Annals of Applied Statistics, and Technometrics. He is a founding editorial board member of China’s first international stroke journal, Stroke and Vascular Neurology, and its only non-neurologist editor responsible for precision medicine.

Professor Shen teaches business analytics for HKU’s various degree and executive education programmes. He has placed 10 PhD students as faculty members of US research universities including Princeton, Columbia, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Purdue University. He has consulted for multinationals such as Allcatel-Lucent, Bank of America, GlaxoSmithKline, and Xerox. 

He has received funding from the US National Science Foundation, the US National Institutes of Health
Challenge Grant, The Xerox Foundation, and the China Ministry of Technology National Key Project. In 2018, Professor Shen also won The Most Influential Publication Award from the China Stroke Association.