Charles Wang-Wai Ng

Professor Charles W. W. Ng is currently the Dean of HKUST Fok Ying Tung Graduate School, CLP Holdings Professor of Sustainability and Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is the President of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (2017-2021).

Professor Ng earned his PhD degree from the University of Bristol, UK in 1993. After carrying out a period of post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge between 1993 and 1995, he returned to Hong Kong and joined HKUST as Assistant Professor in 1995 and rose through the ranks to become Chair Professor in 2011. Professor Ng was elected an Overseas Fellow by Churchill College, the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, and a Changjiang Scholar (Chair Professorship in Geotechnical Engineering). He is also a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK), the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers. Currently, he is an Associate Editor of the Canadian Geotechnical Journal.

Professor Ng has supervised more than 55 Ph. D and 60 M. Phil students to graduation and has published some 350 SCI journal articles and 250 conference papers and delivered more than 80 keynotes and state-of-the-art reports across the six continents. He is the main author of three reference books: (i) A Short Course in Soil-structure Engineering of Deep Foundations, Excavations and Tunnels by Thomas Telford in 2004, and (ii) Advanced Unsaturated Soil Mechanics and Engineering and (iii) Plant-Soil slope Interaction by CRC: Taylor & Francis in 2007 and 2019, respectively.

He has received many awards including the 2018 Hong Kong Institution of Engineers best Geotechnical Paper Award, the 2017 Telford Premium Prize from the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Henry Adams Award from the Institution of Structural Engineers (UK), the first Tan Swan Beng Award from the Southeast Asian Geotechnical Society, and the R. M. Quigley Award from the Canadian Geotechnical Society three times for his three best papers published in 2007, 2012 & 2016. He was conferred the 2002 Mao Yisheng Youth Award by the Chinese Institute of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering for his significant contributions in Geotechnical Engineering over the years. He was a recipient of 2007 Overseas and Hong Kong, Macau Young Scholars awarded by the National Science Foundation of China and also one of the recipients of the 2nd Prize of 2015 Scientific Technological Advancement Award by the State of China. Moreover, he won the Teaching Excellent Appreciation Award for the academic year 2018-19 at HKUST.