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Professor Adam Kielman, Assistant Professor of the Department of Music and Professor Patrick Wong Chun Man, Professor of the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Stanley Ho Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the Brain and Mind Institute of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have both received Research Grants Council (RGC) awards in recognition of excellent achievement in their research areas. Professor Kielman was given the Early Career Award and Professor Wong received a Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship.  

After receiving his PhD from Columbia University, Professor Kielman joined CUHK in 2017. His research focuses on popular musics of East Asia, music and place, music and language, music and technology, and sound studies. He was given the Early Career Award for the project “Popular music and new mobilities in Southern China”. Professor Kielman said, “I am very honoured to receive the RGC’s Early Career Award, and am grateful for the ongoing support of CUHK, the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of Music. It is an exciting time for music, the arts, and popular culture in China; I hope that my research may promote a deeper understanding of the important ways music reflects and shapes contemporary culture in China and in our increasingly interconnected world.”

Professor Patrick Wong received his undergraduate and PhD degrees in linguistics and cognitive psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1996 and 2001 respectively, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medical School in 2003.  Prior to joining CUHK in 2013, Professor Wong was a tenured faculty at Northwestern University where he had begun his faculty career a decade before.  Professor Patrick Wong’s research interests are language learning, neurolinguistics, speech processing, communication disorders, language and genetics, auditory neuroscience and music cognition.  His research has appeared in a broad array of interdisciplinary scholarly venues covering both neuroscience and language works including journals such as Nature Neuroscience and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship for his project “Dopamine-related genes and language learning”. Professor Wong said, “I am most honoured to have received the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship.  Language is a defining characteristic of humans. This fellowship will enable me to examine how language learning is achieved by using an interdisciplinary approach.”

About the RGC Early Career Scheme and Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme

The RGC Early Career Scheme aims to nurture junior academics, while the primary objective of the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme is to better support outstanding humanities and social sciences academics by granting extended time-off to enable them to focus on research work and writing.