Deep Dive: Faculty of Science × Faculty of Architecture × Faculty of Education

Module: 01 Academics · Deep Dive Last updated: 10 July 2026 This piece traces the history of HKU's Faculty of Science (1939), Faculty of Architecture (department from 1950, faculty from 1984) and Faculty of Education (department from 1917, faculty from 1984). For a faculty-level overview, see faculties.md; for the full departmental list, see departments.md. The relationship between the Faculty of Engineering, the new School of Computing and Data Science and the School of Biomedical Engineering is covered in deepdive-engineering.md.

The short answer: These three faculties each trace a lineage that has wound tightly through HKU's own history — the Faculty of Science, founded in 1939, has in recent years spun out three new schools in computing and data science, biomedical engineering and innovation, while bringing in two Nobel laureates; the Faculty of Architecture grew from a single department inside the Faculty of Engineering (1950) to an independent faculty (1984), and every undergraduate architecture student must spend a semester in Shanghai; and the Faculty of Education grew out of a teacher-training unit in the Faculty of Arts (1917), its education subject having held the world's No. 1 ranking for several years running.

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# Part 1 · Faculty of Science (1939)

# 1. History: from three disciplines to an independent faculty

The Faculty of Science was not conjured into being all at once. The disciplines came first, the faculty later. According to the Faculty of Science timeline^※, mathematics, physics and chemistry were already being taught at HKU between 1910 and 1914, with the Department of Physics established as early as 1914; only in 1939 were these natural sciences brought together into a standalone Faculty of Science, with Professor Walter Brown as its founding Dean. At inception it had four departments: biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics. It was the fourth faculty established at HKU before the Second World War.

In the century since, the faculty's departmental boundaries have been redrawn several times — shifts that neatly mirror the splitting and re-merging of the natural sciences themselves:

The biology thread in this timeline — "split first, merge later" — repays a closer look: one biology department split into botany and zoology in 1958, gained a department of ecology and biodiversity in 1994, then was folded back into a single School of Biological Sciences in 2007. Half a century out and back; departmental organisation repeatedly remade as research paradigms shifted from taxonomy to a molecular-cum-ecological emphasis.

# 2. The 2024–25 restructure: the faculty's densest round of spin-offs

According to the Faculty of Science^※, 2024–25 saw the most intensive round of restructuring in the faculty's recent history — three new schools incubated from within over two years:

Sources differ slightly on where the School of Innovation sits (the Faculty of Science page lists it under associated units, while other materials place it under Architecture or Business & Economics) — this archive sets the versions side by side: the affiliation of these new cross-faculty units is still evolving, and the official pages are authoritative.

It is worth noting that this round was no one-way shrinkage of the Faculty of Science. Rather, it pulled out the most interdisciplinary active directions — statistics and actuarial science, computer science, biomedical engineering — and gave them their own homes, letting them cross the old "science–engineering–medicine" faculty walls. The birth of CDS and SBME simultaneously redrew the departmental map on both the science and engineering sides (the engineering-side changes are covered in deepdive-engineering.md).

# 3. Today's departmental structure

Per the Faculty of Science departments page^※, the core units of the faculty are:

The Faculty of Science page also lists CDS, the School of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Innovation as associated units. The former Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science now sits within CDS (its BSc in Actuarial Science and related programmes appear in programs.md). The Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences was renamed from the earlier Department of Earth Sciences, adding the "planetary" to its name in line with its space-research directions.

Read side by side, the five departments each carry a distinct but interwoven lineage:

• Physics is the oldest of them — per the Faculty of Science timeline^※, a physics department existed as early as 1914, a discipline established before the faculty itself; today it is anchored by a Nobel laureate in physics.
• Chemistry has long been HKU's stronghold of inorganic and supermolecular chemistry, marked by two members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chi-Ming Che (支志明) and Vivian Yam (任咏华), and has more recently added Nobel chemistry laureate Stoddart as Chair Professor.
• Mathematics, with physics and chemistry, was one of the three founding disciplines in 1939; its research is supported by the Institute of Mathematical Research (IMR).
• The School of Biological Sciences took the most circuitous path: the 1939 biology department split in 1958 into botany and zoology, gained a department of ecology and biodiversity in 1994, and in 2007 the three merged back into today's school; its marine work is anchored at the Swire Institute of Marine Science on Cape D'Aguilar.
• Earth and Planetary Sciences was renamed from Earth Sciences to fold planetary science and deep-space exploration into the name, echoing the work of the Laboratory for Space Research.
• The former Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science (established 1967, formally integrated into the faculty in 2004) moved out to CDS in 2024 — the one unit in this restructure to "leave the faculty".

# 4. Laboratories and institutes underpinning research

The faculty's research strength does not rest on its five departments alone; a network of cross-departmental and cross-institutional units does a great deal of the work. The representative platforms listed on the Faculty of Science departments page^※ include:

• Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) — HKU's core platform for astronomy and deep-space exploration, involved in scientific payload research for national lunar and Mars missions;
• HKU Institute of Astrophysics (HKIAA) — brings together physics-department and cross-institutional work in astronomical observation and theory;
• HK Institute of Quantum Science and Technology (HKIQST) — an emerging platform for quantum computing and quantum materials;
• Swire Institute of Marine Science (SWIMS) — located at Cape D'Aguilar on the southeastern tip of Hong Kong Island, the School of Biological Sciences' field station for marine ecology and biodiversity research;
• Institute of Mathematical Research (IMR) and the HKU–CAS Joint Laboratories — supporting pure and applied mathematics research, and joint projects with leading mainland China institutions, respectively.

The geography of these units is itself a clue: from deep space (LSR) to deep sea (SWIMS), from the quantum scale to mathematical abstraction, the faculty's research increasingly proceeds through dedicated platforms rather than single departments.

# 5. Nobel laureates in residence

Recent hires have been a striking success for the Faculty of Science, which for a stretch hosted two Nobel laureates at once. According to an HKU press release^※, Professor Sir Fraser Stoddart, 2016 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, was appointed Chair Professor of Chemistry at HKU; he shared that year's chemistry prize with Bernard Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage for his foundational work in the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

On the physics side, per an HKU press release^※, Professor Ferenc Krausz, 2023 Nobel laureate in Physics, took up a Chair Professorship in the Department of Physics from November 2025. A pioneer of ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics, since arriving he has focused on using laser technology to improve global medical diagnostics and advance "preventive medicine", and has already delivered his inaugural lecture at HKU. He was subsequently elected an International Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (per HKU press release^※).

The two represent two frontiers of a kind: Stoddart's molecular machines push chemistry to the scale of "building controllable moving parts out of molecules" — foundational to nanotechnology and supramolecular chemistry; Krausz's attosecond lasers push time resolution to a quintillionth of a second, letting scientists "see" electrons move, with his HKU remit pointing toward laser-based blood screening for early disease detection. A single faculty at one university holding two sitting Nobel laureates is rare for HKU and for any Hong Kong university — a concrete payoff of the faculty's recent international recruitment strategy.

# 6. Local academicians and subject rankings

The faculty's depth is not all imported. According to the Faculty of Science timeline^※, Professor Chi-Ming Che of the Chemistry Department was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1996, the first Hong Kong citizen to receive that honour; his colleague Professor Vivian Yam followed in 2001 at the age of 38, then among the youngest academicians. These two locally trained scholars, renowned for inorganic and supramolecular chemistry, show a faculty whose research base pairs recent Nobel lustre with a home-grown academic tradition built up over decades.

On rankings, per the 2026 QS World University Rankings by Subject^※, HKU's chemistry, physics and astronomy, biological sciences, earth and marine sciences, environmental sciences, life sciences and medicine, materials science, mathematics and related science subjects all rank within the world's top 60 — a concrete measure of the university's overall strength in the natural sciences (exact subject positions are consolidated in Module 03, see the rankings overview).

# 7. Undergraduate education and scale

Undergraduate education in the faculty has been through several reforms of its own. Per the Faculty of Science timeline^※, the faculty admitted its first postgraduate student as early as 1950; its traditions of student societies and science popularisation also began early — a Science Society was founded in 1940, the first science exhibition held in 1952, and a Fisheries Research Unit established the same year. Alongside teaching and research, these student organisations and public-facing activities form a second strand of the faculty's tradition.

On curriculum structure, 2004 saw the introduction of a major–minor system, letting science students combine courses across departments; 2012 brought the four-year undergraduate curriculum with the university-wide reform; and 2018 added new offerings such as Intensive Majors and the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Applied Artificial Intelligence [BASc(AppliedAI)], weaving data science and AI training into the traditional science undergraduate degree. By 2015, the faculty's global alumni body numbered some 20,000. From the Science Society and exhibitions of the 1940s to the applied-AI degree of 2018, the undergraduate face of the Faculty of Science keeps updating with the centre of gravity of science itself (the full undergraduate programme lineage is in programs.md).

# 8. Sites and laboratory buildings

The faculty's physical footprint, like its departments, has moved several times. Per the Faculty of Science timeline^※, in its early years the departments moved from the west wing of the Main Building into the Northcote Science Building, completed in 1941; in 1994, the Chong Yuet Ming Chemistry and Physics Building opened as the modern home of the chemistry and physics departments. Add the Swire Institute of Marine Science field station at Cape D'Aguilar on the southeastern coast, and the faculty's teaching and research spaces run from the Main Building and Northcote all the way to a marine station on the shoreline — a physical trajectory expanding in step with its disciplines, and a neat counterpart to the Faculty of Engineering's three-generation spread from pre-war workshops to post-war teaching blocks to contemporary maker spaces (see deepdive-engineering.md).

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# Part 2 · Faculty of Architecture (department 1950 / faculty 1984)

# 1. History: from a department inside Engineering to an independent faculty

Architecture education at HKU begins as a single department in the Faculty of Engineering. Per the Faculty of Architecture's history^※:

At the time of the 1984 elevation, the history records a major fire on the third and fourth floors of the Knowles Building; the departments temporarily relocated to the Duncan Sloss Building, returning the following year — the faculty nonetheless attained faculty status on schedule.

Across this timeline, the Faculty of Architecture has steadily widened its self-conception from "professional school" to "comprehensive school of design": from the single architecture department of its early years, it absorbed urban planning, surveying (later real estate and construction) and landscape architecture through the 1980s, expanding "putting up buildings" into the full design spectrum of "making cities, managing construction, shaping landscapes".

A pivotal turn came in 1975: per the Faculty of Architecture history^※, the faculty converted the five-year BArch of 1955 vintage into a three-year BA(AS), added a "Building Stream", and in 1978 further introduced the BSc in Building Studies. The reform locked in the two-stage structure that has defined HKU architecture education ever since — a broad undergraduate degree followed by a professional master's — with general design literacy and critical thinking at the undergraduate level and professional qualification deferred to the MArch, aligning with the "liberal arts first, professional later" path of European and American architecture education.

# 2. Today's departments and programmes

Per the Faculty of Architecture departments and divisions page^※, there are four units:

The flagship undergraduate programme is the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies [BA(AS)] — per the Faculty of Architecture history^※, a four-year intensive degree leading into the Master of Architecture for professional qualification; the faculty also offers undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in real estate, urban planning and landscape architecture. BASc(Design+) is led by the Faculty of Architecture (see programs.md).

At postgraduate level, the professional master's offerings map one-to-one onto the four units: the Master of Architecture (MArch) is the essential step toward professional qualification as an architect, the Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) received dual recognition in 1995 from the Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects and the Landscape Institute (UK), and the Master of Urban Design (MUD) plus the taught master's in real estate and urban planning cover the planning and construction directions. This two-stage structure — broad undergraduate foundation, professional qualification at the master's — is the typical path for architectural disciplines, distinct from the general arts and sciences.

# 3. Shanghai Study Centre and notable alumni

The faculty enforces one requirement rare at HKU: per the Faculty of Architecture Shanghai Study Centre page^※, every undergraduate in the Department of Architecture must spend one semester at the Shanghai Study Centre, treating the Yangtze Delta's fast-transforming megacity as a living classroom. The arrangement gives HKU architecture education a distinctly "local–cross-border" double lens: rooted in Hong Kong's high-density urban context while plunging students directly into the urbanisation sites of mainland China.

On the alumni side, the faculty has produced architects who have left their mark across South China and beyond. Per the Faculty of Architecture featured alumni page^※, Rocco Yim (严迅奇) earned his Bachelor of Architecture in 1976; his firm Rocco Design Architects led design of the Hong Kong Palace Museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District among other major projects, and he has received an honorary doctorate from HKU at its 188th congregation. From Eric Lye to Rocco Yim, from a burning school building to the Shanghai semester, the "local–international" double thread runs through the faculty's century-long story.

# 4. Professional accreditation and the four units' division of labour

For professional disciplines like architecture, surveying and landscape architecture, whether a programme is accredited by professional bodies directly determines graduates' licence to practise. Per the Faculty of Architecture history^※, the accreditation lineage reaches back to 1961, when the architecture programme was recognised by the RIBA, and 1968, when it gained recognition from the Commonwealth Association of Architects (CAA); the MLA additionally received dual recognition in 1995 from the Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects and the Landscape Institute (UK). These accreditations plug HKU architecture into an international system of mutual professional recognition, letting graduates' qualifications travel across borders.

The four units divide the professional labour: the Department of Architecture carries the design-led main line of BA(AS) and MArch; the Department of Real Estate and Construction descends from the old Department of Surveying (established 1987, renamed 1996), covering real estate, construction management and surveying; the Department of Urban Planning and Design inherits the Centre of Urban Studies and Urban Planning (CUSUP) of 1980 and the MUD of 1988; and the Division of Landscape Architecture centres on the MLA, launched in 1993 and doubly accredited in 1995. Together the four string a complete chain of spatial design: "single building — urban scale — land and construction — landscape". Earlier still, the faculty sent its first exchange students to France and Switzerland in 1997 and launched the "Career Discovery in Architecture" summer programme, folding international exchange and career orientation into undergraduate training.

On the physical campus, one episode in the faculty's history speaks to its entanglement with HKU's ageing buildings. Per the Faculty of Architecture history^※, around the 1984 elevation, a fire broke out on the third and fourth floors of the Knowles Building, the faculty's long-time home; the departments temporarily relocated to the Duncan Sloss Building, returning the following year (1985) once the fire damage was repaired. The fire did not slow the elevation — the faculty became independent in 1984 as scheduled — but it did add a "demarcated by fire" memory to the faculty's century.

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# Part 3 · Faculty of Education (department 1917 / faculty 1984)

# 1. History: teacher training born in the Faculty of Arts

The Faculty of Education's bloodline runs back to a department inside the Faculty of Arts responsible for training teachers. Per the Faculty of Education history^※:

The Faculty of Education shares its origins with the Faculty of Arts — HKU's teacher training began as part of the Arts faculty (see deepdive-arts-socsci.md). From a "Department for the Training of Teachers" inside Arts in 1917, to an independent faculty in 1984, to the centenary of teacher training in 2017, this is one of the longest spans at HKU of "a single department growing into a faculty".

One detail worth recording: the social conscience of the teacher-training mission is almost as old as the department. According to the history, as early as 1931–32 HKU's teacher trainers ran a Free Night School providing education for underprivileged and out-of-school children, revived in 1955 when the Education Society was re-formed. This thread — "train teachers on one hand, run schools for the poor on the other" — foreshadows the Faculty of Education's later concerns with special education, social context and educational equity.

# 2. Today's academic units (after the 2024 restructure)

Per the Faculty of Education history^※, the 2024 restructure produced four academic units:

This four-unit structure refines the three units of 2017 into four parallel strands — "language", "communication and development", "mathematics, science and technology", and "social contexts and policy" — replacing the old division into education and professional studies departments, and mapping better onto contemporary education research that cuts across psychology, language, technology and policy.

This is the faculty's third major reorganisation. Per the Faculty of Education history^※, 1985 saw the formal establishment of the INSTEP committee for in-service teacher education, institutionalising teachers' continuing professional development; 2002 saw the one-off abolition of departments in favour of a unitary faculty, with the Division of Sports and Exercise Science folded in beside the Institute of Human Performance. From two departments to a unitary structure, then to three units in 2017 and four in 2024, the Faculty of Education's organisation has been redrawn several times in two decades — evidence of its continuing search for a balance between "breaking down departmental walls" and "preserving disciplinary division".

# 3. Programme features: beyond teacher training

• Teacher training (mostly BEd double degrees, such as BA&BEd in language education) and educational psychology remain the faculty's founding core.
• Speech and Hearing Sciences is one of the faculty's most distinctive undergraduate programmes; in 2017 the faculty opened the Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic, bringing clinical training in speech therapy into teaching and serving the community.
• Information Management is another signature undergraduate programme, setting information science alongside management.
• BASc (Social Data Science) is led by the Faculty of Education (see programs.md).

# 4. The world's No. 1 education subject

The faculty's most striking calling card is its subject ranking. Per the Faculty of Education history^※, HKU's education and educational research subject took first place globally in the U.S. News Best Global Universities subject ranking in 2022–23, and has held the top spot for several consecutive years since — retaining the world No. 1 even after the 2024 internal restructure into four academic units. The faculty's modern home, the Run Run Shaw Building, has been in continuous use since its opening by Sir Edward Youde in 1985, witnessing each successive reorganisation from two departments to a unitary structure to four units. For a faculty that began as a teacher-training unit in the Faculty of Arts and only gained faculty status in 1984, this ranking is a concrete footnote to a century of accumulation (exact subject positions and annual criteria are consolidated in Module 03, see the rankings overview).

# 5. Research centre network

The faculty's research is not confined to its four academic units; a network of specialised centres deepens work in language, comparative education, special education and communication disorders. Per the Faculty of Education history^※, the faculty has successively established the Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative / English Language Centre (TELEC, 1994), the Comparative Education Research Centre (1995), the Putonghua Education and Testing Centre (1997), and later the Centre for Advancement in Chinese Language Education and Research (CACLER), the Centre for Advancement in Special Education (CASE) and, in 2011, the Centre for Communication Disorders. At postgraduate level, the faculty launched the Doctor of Education (EdD) in 2003–05, completing a progression alongside the existing MEd, MPhil and PhD.

The centre topics — comparative education, Putonghua and Chinese-language education, special education, communication disorders — show the faculty extending "how teachers teach" into "how people learn across different languages, different abilities and different social contexts". This is precisely the research backbone of the three strands in the 2024 four-unit structure: "language and literacy", "human communication, learning and development", and "social contexts and policies".

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# 1. Unverified / To be supplemented

• Affiliation of the School of Innovation: sources differ; this piece sets the versions side by side and defers to official pages.
• Exact undergraduate programme list of the Faculty of Education: the official page does not list it exhaustively; this piece describes the known framework and flags "exact list to be supplemented".
• Exact QS/U.S. News subject ranks for each faculty: consolidated in Module 03; this piece does not record year-by-year positions.
• Latest establishment of the Faculty of Science's research institutes: the affiliations and staffing of platforms such as LSR, SWIMS and HKIQST have been updated through the reorganisation; official pages are authoritative.

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# Related reading

• faculties.md — overview of all HKU faculties
• departments.md — complete list of departments and their affiliations
• programs.md — undergraduate and postgraduate programme lineage (BA(AS), BASc, actuarial science, etc.)
• deepdive-engineering.md — deep-dive profile of the Faculty of Engineering (shared lineage with CDS and SBME)
• deepdive-arts-socsci.md — Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Social Sciences (the Faculty of Education's original parent)

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