Bulletin No. 1, 2016

44 Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2016 Statistics Student Wins Best Student Research Paper Award at INFORMS Pun Chi-seng, a PhD student in the statistics programme, won the 2015 Best Student Research Paper Award for a pape r he p re s ented a t t he 2015 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences ( INFORMS) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia—the first time ever a PhD student from the Asia-Pacific region won this international accolade. His award winning paper was entitled ‘Combined Estimation- Optimization (CEO) Approach for High Dimensional Portfolio Selection’. The Best and the Brightest First Prize in Hong Kong Tertiary Schools COP21 Challenge 2015 Yeung Tsz-chun Arthur (1st right) and Chung Sum-yue Natalie (1st left) of Wu Yee Sun College teamed up with another HKUST student to develop V’air—an online platform for individuals and groups to list tours available in Hong Kong, and offers incentives to attract people to spend their money and holidays locally, in order to reduce pollutions associated with overseas travel. The creative concept won the First Prize in the Hong Kong Tertiary Schools COP21 Challenge jointly organized by the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong and Macau and The Hong Kong Sustainable Campus Consortium last year. Life Sciences/United College Student Named Rhodes Scholar Dai Yichen Serena, a final-year student of the Molecular Biotechnology Programme of the School of Life Sciences and of United College, has won against a number of outstanding students from various institutions in the territory to become the Rhodes Scholar for Hong Kong 2016. She is eligible for a scholarship of more than a million Hong Kong dollars to pursue a PhD degree in Zoology at the University of Oxford. Her research will focus on the link between pancreas development and diabetes, and will explore various metabolic pathways related to diabetes from an evolutionary perspective.