The University of Macau (UM) will hold the Ceremony for the Conferment of Honorary and Higher Degrees 2023 on 2 December (Saturday), where honorary doctorates will be conferred on five distinguished individuals: Cai Fang, Leong Kam Weng, Ching-Ping Wong, Franco Maloberti, and William Shiyuan Wang. Doctoral and master’s degrees will also be awarded on the occasion.
In recognition of their outstanding achievements and significant contributions to society, five distinguished individuals will be honored at the ceremony. Prof Cai Fang will receive a Doctor of Social Sciences honoris causa, Leong Kam Weng will receive a Doctor of Science honoris causa, Prof Ching-Ping Wong will receive a Doctor of Science honoris causa, Prof Franco Maloberti will receive a Doctor of Science honoris causa, and Prof William Shiyuan Wang will receive a Doctor of Humanities honoris causa.
Prof Cai Fang is a member of the Academic Committee of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a chief expert of the CASS China Top Think Tank, and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China. He is also a member of the Academic Committee of the Chinese Economists 50 Forum, and the chairman of the Academic Committee of the China Finance 40 Forum. Prof Cai has published more than 200 research articles and over 30 monographs in Chinese and English. He is the author of China’s Economy: Practical Exploration and Academic Understanding, The Development and Transformation of China’s Labour Market, and Beyond Demographic Dividends, as well as the editor of the Reports on China’s Population and Labor series. Recognised as one of the ‘100 economists who influenced the economic development of China in the past 60 years’, Prof Cai was the winner of the Second Zhang Peigang Development Economics Outstanding Research Achievement Award, the First China Soft Science Award, and the Fourth China Development 100 Person’s Award.
Prof Leong Kam Weng is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the US National Academy of Medicine. He is currently the Samuel Y. Sheng Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and with a joint appointment in the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University in the US. Prof Leong has published more than 450 papers and has been cited over 67,000 times, with an H-index of 133. In 2018 and 2022, he was listed as an ESI Highly Cited Researcher. He holds more than 60 granted patents and 14 published patents. Prof Leong is ranked No 8 in the World Scientists Engineering & Technology / Biomedical Engineering Rankings 2024 by AD Scientific Index. Since 2014, he has been the editor-in-chief of Biomaterials, a top journal in the field of biomaterials. Prof Leong was also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences of UM in 2019.
Prof Ching-Ping Wong is a world-renowned scholar in electronic engineering and is known as the Father of Modern Semiconductor Packaging, second only to Nobel laureate Sir Charles Kuen Kao. He is currently Regents’ Professor and the Charles Smithgall Institute Endowed Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. In addition, he is as an adjunct professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and has been granted the title of Emeritus Professor by the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prof Wong’s research interests include polymeric electronic materials, electronic, photonic, and micro-electromechanical system packaging, interconnect and interfacial adhesions, as well as nano-functional material syntheses and characterisations. He has published over 1,000 technical papers, authored and edited 12 books, and holds more than 65 US patents.
Prof Franco Maloberti is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is currently the IEEE Division I Director (2022-2023). He is the author of more than 620 papers and 10 books, as well as the holder of 41 patents. In recognition of his significant contributions to the development of microelectronics at UM, the university conferred on him an honorary professorship in 2009. Prof Maloberti maintains a close partnership with UM. In 2010, he co-authored a paper on analogue-to-digital converters (ADC). The paper has been cited more than 600 times, making it the most cited paper in the State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI.
Prof William Shiyuan Wang is a world-renowned linguist and an academician of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He founded Journal of Chinese Linguistics, the most influential academic journal in the field of linguistics. Prof Wang was elected founding president of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics in 1992, and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Shanghai Society of Anthropology in 2017. He was conferred the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by the University of Chicago in 2018. He has also received honorary professorships from esteemed universities such as Peking University, Fudan University, and Nankai University. Over the years, Prof Wang has taken an interest in Macao and the academic development of UM. He has made multiple visits to Macao to share his academic insights, introduce cutting-edge research, and carry out academic exchanges and collaborations.
In addition, there are more than 1,500 graduates from the doctoral and master’s programmes, as well as postgraduate certificate/diploma programmes across UM’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Faculty of Business Administration, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Health Sciences, Faculty of Law, Faculty of Science and Technology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, Institute of Collaborative Innovation, and Institute of Microelectronics.
