School of Public Health, School of Chinese Medicine, School of Nursing and School of Biomedical Sciences

This article is part of the "Schools cluster" section of Module 11 – Medicine/Hospitals of the HKU Wild History site. Under the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, alongside the clinical school, sit four "non-clinical" schools — the School of Public Health, School of Chinese Medicine, School of Nursing and School of Biomedical Sciences. This article traces each in turn — their history, programmes and research strengths — with particular attention to the School of Public Health's role as a WHO Collaborating Centre. The full institutional history of the School of Nursing is treated separately in school-of-nursing-history.md.

For an overview of the Faculty of Medicine's structure, see ./li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md; for the research strengths of the clinical departments, see ./departments-and-strengths.md. This module falls within reference zones 00–12 and carries no credibility badges; neutral academic achievements are recorded by name. Data as of July 2026.

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# 1. Overview

Together with the clinical school, these four form the Faculty's complete disciplinary spectrum of "clinical – population – basic" sciences: the clinical school teaches bedside diagnosis and treatment, the School of Public Health works at the scale of populations and policy, the School of Biomedical Sciences pursues basic laboratory science, and Chinese medicine and nursing each constitute their own professional systems.

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# 2. School of Public Health: from the Department of Social Medicine to a WHO Collaborating Centre

# 2.1 A lineage of public health reaching back to 1887

Public health education at HKU has deep roots. According to the School of Public Health's official history page^※, public health education began as early as 1887, during the era of the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese (founded by Patrick Manson, James Cantlie and Ho Kai). It has since undergone several name changes:

Institutionally, today's School of Public Health is not a monolith but an assembly of divisions — epidemiology and biostatistics, community medicine, behavioural health, public health laboratory sciences and others each occupy their own corner, covering respectively fieldwork, data modelling, health-behaviour interventions and pathogen laboratory work. This "one school, many divisions" structure is the product of the School's expansion from a single community-medicine department, absorbing different disciplines along the way.

Leadership choices reflect the School's international orientation. According to the School of Public Health's biography of Keiji Fukuda^※, Keiji Fukuda, a former WHO Assistant Director-General who had overseen influenza and emerging diseases at the organisation, joined the School in December 2016 and served as its Director from 2017 to 2021 — the appointment of a former WHO leader to the helm saying a great deal about the depth of the School's ties to the WHO system. During his tenure, Fukuda pushed the School towards a more global, real-world perspective on public health and opened new research directions including antimicrobial resistance (AMR). After his retirement in 2021, the epidemiologist Gabriel Leung served as Acting Director; Leung had returned to Hong Kong in 2012 to head the Department of Community Medicine, which was absorbed into the School of Public Health the following year — making him one of the witnesses to the School's restructuring over the past decade and more.

# 2.2 WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control (2014)

The School's most internationally recognisable role is as a WHO Collaborating Centre. According to the School's official page on the WHO Collaborating Centre^※:

• Date of designation: designated on 19 December 2014 as the "WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control"^※ — the first such centre at HKU;
• Co-directors: Professor Benjamin J Cowling and Professor Seto Wing-hong^※;
• Functions: collaboration with WHO covering strengthening infection prevention and control capacity, responding to antimicrobial resistance, and enhancing outbreak response to emerging and re-emerging pathogens^※.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, this WHO Collaborating Centre issued real-time "nowcasts" on the likely extent of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and its local and international transmission (according to a related HKUMed press release^※).

# 2.3 More than one WHO title: the H5 Reference Laboratory and the Centre for Influenza Research

Alongside the Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology, the School of Public Health carries another WHO designation. According to HKUMed's introduction to the "WHO H5 Reference Laboratory"^※, the School's Centre for Influenza Research is one of only about a dozen "WHO H5 Reference Laboratories" worldwide, serving as a reference laboratory for H5 avian influenza and SARS-CoV-2 within the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS), and maintaining long-standing collaboration with international bodies including WHO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health. This strength in avian influenza research traces back to the H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997 — the first recorded instance of an avian influenza virus directly causing human deaths, and the event that put the city at the global forefront of influenza research.

The School's research agenda can be summed up in one phrase: "One Health." According to the School of Public Health's own account, its research focuses on emerging viral diseases, particularly pathogens that jump from animals to humans, spanning virology, epidemiology, biostatistics and health policy. Its Division of Public Health Laboratory Sciences carries out the laboratory work — from pathogen isolation and genome sequencing to transmission mechanisms — complementing teams such as the clinical microbiology unit in the clinical school. The infectious disease strengths on the clinical side of the Faculty are treated in ./departments-and-strengths.md.

# 2.4 Two generations of virologists: from SARS source-tracing to COVID modelling

The standing of HKU public health in the international academy rests heavily on a group of scientists who lived through the pandemics of the new century.

• Professor Malik Peiris is a clinical and public health virologist who has long studied emerging viruses at the animal–human interface. According to a HKUMed press release^※, he played a key role in the 2003 SARS outbreak, helping confirm a novel coronavirus as the causative agent and establishing research into diagnosis and pathogenesis. He was subsequently elected a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2017. His team has also made systematic contributions to the source-tracing and pathogenesis of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus and of avian influenza viruses including H5N1, H9N2 and H7N9.
• The School's epidemiologists, meanwhile, have successively characterised the epidemiology of three emerging viral outbreaks — SARS (2003), avian influenza A/H7N9 (2013) and COVID-19 (2020). From incubation periods and serial intervals to case fatality rates, these parameters are fundamental inputs for public health decision-making everywhere.

# 2.5 The InnoHK era: the D24H data laboratory and global rankings

In recent years the School of Public Health has reached into data science. According to the InnoHK@HKU introduction^※, in 2021 the "Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health" (D²4H) was established under the School, funded by the Hong Kong SAR Government's Health@InnoHK initiative, dedicated to pooling and curating large-scale health data resources and developing cutting-edge analytical methods to improve individual health and global public health through precision medicine. This marks the School's extension from traditional field epidemiology towards a "big data + precision public health" research paradigm.

In international rankings, according to the School of Public Health's own website^※, the School ranks first in Asia and among the top globally in the public health category of the ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects; this performance is directly linked to its high-impact research output during the COVID-19 pandemic. By comparison, the School of Nursing likewise ranks first among nursing programmes in Hong Kong in the UGC research assessment exercise — the research calibre of the two schools can be set side by side; see ./school-of-nursing-history.md.

# 2.6 How epidemics fed a school

The School of Public Health's international standing in infectious disease epidemiology is bound up, cause and effect, with Hong Kong's own history of epidemics. 1997 H5N1, 2003 SARS, 2009 H1N1, 2013 H7N9, 2020 COVID-19 — each outbreak has served as a stress test of the School's research capacity, and has brought sustained policy attention and resources. According to a School of Public Health account^※, following SARS in 2003 the Hong Kong Government provided long-term support for infectious disease epidemiology research at HKU through the Health and Medical Research Fund (HMRF). One might say the School's world-class foundations are the crystallisation of decades of research investment by a city that has repeatedly been at the epicentre of epidemics.

# 2.7 An undergraduate degree spanning six faculties: Global Health and Development

The School's flagship undergraduate programme is the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Global Health and Development (BASc GHD), launched in 2019. According to the official BASc GHD programme page^※, this is the first interdisciplinary programme of its kind in Asia, focusing on the intertwining of health and development under major trends including globalisation, population growth, ageing, urbanisation and climate change.

The curriculum design says much about public health's omnivorous nature. According to the HKU admissions page^※, the major is led by the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine and delivered jointly with five other faculties — Architecture; Business and Economics; Law; Science; and Social Sciences. A distinctive feature is the capstone: students are placed with international health and development agencies, multinational organisations, consultancies or NGOs for a roughly six-month field placement. The teaching staff span public health clinical practice, infectious disease epidemiology, non-communicable diseases and lifestyle interventions, biostatistics, tobacco control, environmental protection, psycho-oncology and health economics and management — read that list and you get the breadth of the School's research map: it does laboratory virology, population-level chronic disease and tobacco control, and health policy and economics. Tobacco control is a particular strength, and its smoking-cessation services and second-hand smoke research are repeatedly cited in local public health policy debates.

# 2.8 Tobacco control research: the public health evidence behind a long-lived city

If infectious disease epidemiology is the School's "fast disease" calling card in the international academy, then tobacco control is its most seasoned line of work on the chronic disease side. Within the community medicine tradition there has long been a team focused on the harms of tobacco and on cessation interventions, whose leading figure is Professor Lam Tai-hing. According to his School of Public Health biography^※, he has led more than a hundred studies covering the health harms and economic costs of smoking and second-hand smoke, adolescent smoking, the role of healthcare workers in tobacco control, cessation research built around brief interventions and randomised controlled trials, and the evaluation of novel tobacco products such as e-cigarettes. In 1998 he received a commemorative certificate and medal from WHO.

Such research is not ivory-tower self-talk; it feeds directly into Hong Kong's public health policy debate. According to a 2021 HKUMed press release^※, a study by the School's team attributed Hong Kong's standing as "one of the longest-lived regions in the world" to the city's decades of progressively tightened tobacco control — high tobacco taxes, smoke-free public places and layered smoking-cessation services were shown to be among the key drivers of extended life expectancy. A health outcome taken for granted (Hong Kongers' longevity) is reverse-engineered by public health research into a chain of attributable policy variables — that is population-scale public health thinking in action, and it explains why the School's tobacco evidence is so often cited in Legislative Council debates on smoking bans. Beyond tobacco, the School's population cohort studies on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), healthy ageing and lifestyle interventions are equally part of what distinguishes it from a purely laboratory institution.

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# 3. School of Chinese Medicine: evidence-based Chinese medicine at HKU

The School of Chinese Medicine is the Faculty's dedicated unit for teaching and research in Chinese medicine.

# 3.1 Founding and restructuring

On the founding year, two official sources differ in emphasis; this archive sets them side by side:

• According to the HKUMed 135th-anniversary milestones page^※, the School of Chinese Medicine was established in 1998 and launched the Bachelor of Chinese Medicine programme;
• According to the School's official introduction^※, the School "was established as early as 1998", offering part-time certificate, diploma and undergraduate programmes aimed at promoting interdisciplinary research in Chinese medicine, and was subsequently restructured in 2002, after which it acquired its own teaching building on campus.

The two accounts are not contradictory: 1998 was the School's founding year; 2002 marked the restructuring and the definitive establishment of the full-time UGC-funded undergraduate programme.

# 3.2 A six-year undergraduate degree: five years in Hong Kong, one year north

The School currently offers the Bachelor of Chinese Medicine (BChinMed, JUPAS code JS6482)^※. Unlike most three- or four-year undergraduate degrees, BChinMed is a six-year programme — according to the School's full-time undergraduate programme page^※, students take Chinese medicine theory, modern biomedical science and core general education courses in Hong Kong; in the fourth year they complete a four-week junior clerkship at the University of Hong Kong–Shenzhen Hospital; and in the final (sixth) year, the School arranges a continuous 40-week clinical clerkship at the teaching hospitals of leading Chinese medicine universities on the mainland. Since the 2008/09 academic year there has also been an undergraduate exchange with Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, under which selected students spend a summer semester there. This structure — grounding in Hong Kong, then clinical training on the mainland in the final year — bridges the Faculty's biomedical training with the mature clinical system of Chinese medicine on the mainland.

According to the School's official introduction^※, the School aims to combine Chinese medicine theory with modern biomedical science, producing Chinese medicine practitioners who command both the theoretical knowledge of Chinese medicine and biomedical literacy and practical skills. Its research orientation is squarely "evidence-based Chinese medicine" — using the methodologies of modern biomedical science to test and interpret traditional formulas and therapies, rather than merely passing on experience.

# 3.3 From "no hospital to lean on" to the Tseung Kwan O Chinese Medicine Hospital (2025)

A long-standing weakness of Chinese medicine education in Hong Kong has been the lack of a true inpatient Chinese medicine hospital as a clinical backbone — students' clinical training has relied mostly on outpatient teaching and research centres and on clerkships on the mainland. That changed in 2025.

According to news.gov.hk^※ and a Hong Kong Baptist University announcement^※, the Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital (HKCMH) in Po Shun Lane, Tseung Kwan O — the city's first inpatient Chinese medicine hospital — began phased operations in December 2025. The hospital is operated by Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and, from September 2025, under agreements with HKU, CUHK and HKBU, serves concurrently as the teaching hospital for the Chinese medicine schools of all three universities, providing students with an inpatient clinical clerkship platform. This means that students on HKU's BChinMed, besides their mainland clerkships, finally have a local inpatient Chinese medicine teaching base.

Note: several universities in Hong Kong run schools of Chinese medicine (HKBU, CUHK and others), each with its own history and positioning. The Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital is operated by HKBU and shared by three universities — it is not an HKU-exclusive facility. This article describes only HKU's School of Chinese Medicine and its clinical training pathway, and makes no judgement on comparative claims such as "the first in Hong Kong." The analogous logic of nursing education's shift from the "hospital system" to the "university system" can be found in ./school-of-nursing-history.md.

# 3.4 The threshold beyond the degree: the 1999 Chinese Medicine Ordinance and the licensing examination

To grasp the weight of HKU's BChinMed, one must understand the regulatory backdrop of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong. For a long time, the practice of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong operated in a grey zone with no licensing regime. It was not until 14 July 1999, when the Legislative Council passed the Chinese Medicine Ordinance (Cap. 549 of the Laws of Hong Kong), that a legal framework was established for the practice of Chinese medicine and the use, manufacture and sale of Chinese medicines. Under the Chinese medicine regulatory system, those wishing to register as "Registered Chinese Medicine Practitioners" must pass the licensing examination held by the Chinese Medicine Practitioners Board under the Chinese Medicine Council of Hong Kong.

This regime directly shapes the exit pathway of HKU's BChinMed: its graduates sit this examination to obtain registered practitioner status and enter a regulated practice. In other words, the six-year degree is not purely academic; it is a professional programme that connects to a statutory licence — structurally analogous to MBBS graduates having to complete internship and registration, and nursing students having to pass nurse registration (for the nursing registration pathway, see ./school-of-nursing-history.md).

# 3.5 Teaching clinics practising Chinese and Western medicine side by side

Before the inpatient hospital arrived, the School of Chinese Medicine's clinical teaching relied chiefly on its own outpatient teaching and research centres. According to the School's clinical services page^※, the School runs Chinese medicine outpatient clinical centres providing outpatient services through an integrated Chinese–Western medicine approach, serving both as a point of care for the public and as a site for students' clinical apprenticeship and for faculty's evidence-based research. Such "teaching clinics" fill the gap in local clinical training and allow the School to put classroom "evidence-based Chinese medicine" into practice in real cases, from diagnosis to follow-up — a key point of difference from purely apprenticeship-based traditions of Chinese medicine education.

# 3.6 Ten clinical teaching and research bases: from two self-run clinics to a cross-border network

For the School of Chinese Medicine, "teaching clinics" are not a room or two but a network that has spread year by year. According to the School's clinical services overview^※ and a related HKUMed account^※, the School now operates ten clinical teaching and research bases: two clinical centres run directly by the School, six outpatient clinics established through tripartite collaboration between the Hospital Authority, NGOs and HKU, and two affiliated clinics at Gleneagles Hospital Hong Kong and HKU-Shenzhen Hospital. This structure extends students' clinical apprenticeship from a single outpatient clinic to three practice settings — public, private and cross-border.

A significant upgrade of the network came in 2023. According to a HKUMed press release^※, the School's clinical centre moved in 2023 into the newly completed HKUMed teaching building at 3 Sassoon Road, connected by a footbridge directly to Queen Mary Hospital. The new centre is equipped with eight treatment rooms, five consultation rooms, a clinical teaching room and a Chinese medicine dispensary, offering general and specialist outpatient services in internal medicine, acupuncture, and orthopaedics and traumatology (跌打), with its own dispensing. A ceremony marking the relocation was held on 29 May 2023, coinciding with the School's 25th anniversary. Earlier, in March 2022, the School had launched a Chinese medicine teleconsultation service, which during the pandemic reached into residential care homes for the elderly, working with the Hospital Authority to deliver Chinese medicine care to elderly residents — pushing the boundary of the "teaching clinic" from the consulting room to a bed on the other side of a screen.

Read alongside the Tseung Kwan O hospital of Section 3.3, a clear trajectory emerges: the clinical backbone of Chinese medicine at HKU began with self-run outpatient clinics, added tripartite collaborative clinics, then a cross-border hospital in Shenzhen, and finally the city's first inpatient Chinese medicine hospital in 2025. The clinical training "venues" have grown ever denser — the material basis by which this six-year professional degree moves from teaching to a closed loop of practice.

# 3.7 The degree ladder: master's, doctoral and continuing education above the undergraduate degree

The BChinMed is the School's best-known exit pathway, but not the only one. According to the School's official introduction^※, alongside the six-year undergraduate degree the School offers taught postgraduate programmes and research degrees (MPhil/PhD), and retains the historical part-time certificate and diploma progression routes. The research degrees correspond precisely to the School's "evidence-based Chinese medicine" positioning: enabling postgraduate students to use modern biomedical methodologies to test the mechanisms and efficacy of formulas, acupuncture and traditional therapies, converting apprenticeship experience into publishable, verifiable scientific evidence. The School is housed on the sixth floor of the HKUMed teaching building at 3 Sassoon Road, with a clinical skills training centre for Chinese medicine, a Chinese materia medica specimen laboratory and teaching research laboratories — teaching, research and clinical service feed each other under one roof, which is another key point of difference from apprenticeship-centred traditional Chinese medicine education.

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# 4. School of Nursing: see the dedicated in-depth article

HKU's School of Nursing traces its origins to the Department of Nursing Studies, established in 1995, with an inaugural intake of 42 students. It was upgraded to a school in 2010 and is now one of the five schools of the Faculty of Medicine. It offers the Bachelor of Nursing (BNurs, JUPAS code JS6468)^※ (a five-year full-time honours degree), and its research strengths include chronic disease nursing, community health and elderly health. The full institutional history of the School of Nursing — the transformation of nursing education from the "hospital system" to the "university system", the department-to-school upgrade, its successive leaders and their interplay with Hong Kong nursing policy, and the present challenge of nurse shortages — is treated in the dedicated article school-of-nursing-history.md.

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# 5. School of Biomedical Sciences: the basic-science flagship born of three merged departments

The School of Biomedical Sciences (SBS) is the Faculty's basic-science flagship. According to the HKUMed 135th-anniversary milestones page^※, on 1 July 2015 the School of Biomedical Sciences was formed by merging the Departments of Anatomy, Biochemistry and Physiology. Its undergraduate programme, the Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences (BBiomedSc), had already been launched in 2012 — the first such bachelor's degree in Hong Kong.

# 5.1 The confluence of three century-old departments

Although SBS only hung out its shingle in 2015, its bloodlines are very old. According to the School of Biomedical Sciences' official history page^※, the three predecessor departments trace roughly as follows:

In other words, anatomy and physiology are almost as old as HKU itself — among the first academic units of the University — while biochemistry was a product of the mid-20th-century subdivision of the medical sciences. After sharing a building from 2002, the three departments formally merged into one school in 2015 — the Faculty of Medicine's institutional response to the shift of basic science from "separate disciplines" towards "integration."

# 5.2 Research map: from stem cells to synthetic biology

According to the School of Biomedical Sciences' official research page^※, SBS retains the traditional foundations of anatomy, biochemistry and physiology while organising its research into six directions — brain and cognitive sciences; cell signalling and disease; genomics and biomedical data science; stem cells and molecular developmental genetics; structural, chemical and synthetic biology; and technology transfer and innovation — with applications aimed at disease mechanisms and therapeutics, ageing and regenerative medicine. The School carries the Faculty's basic biomedical research from the molecular through the cellular to the systems level, and underlies many of the clinical departments' "world firsts" — the clinical strengths in transplantation, infectious diseases and so on are treated in ./departments-and-strengths.md.

# 5.3 Undergraduate programme: four years, 240 credits, four majors

The Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences (BBiomedSc, JUPAS code JS6949^※) is a four-year programme in which students must complete 240 credits and may specialise in one of four major tracks: biomedical research, bioinformatics, clinical science, or health technology^※. The programme is positioned as producing translational talent "between the laboratory and the clinic", offering a basic-science exit for students aiming at research, the biotech industry or further study in medicine or postgraduate research.

# 5.4 A bench of academician-level basic scientists

The weight of a basic-science school is often visible in how many top researchers who endure the "cold bench" it can retain. SBS's research breadth is visible in its people: according to the School's official research page^※, the expertise of its academic staff spans cancer and cell signalling, stem cells and developmental biology, neural development and neurodegenerative disease, genetics and genomics, viral infection, ageing and regenerative medicine, statistical and computational methods, chemical biology, structural biology and synthetic biology — covering nearly every major branch of the contemporary life sciences.

Its most representative figure is the developmental geneticist Professor Kathryn Cheah. According to an HKU press release^※ and her School faculty page^※, she has long studied the molecular mechanisms of inherited and degenerative skeletal diseases, using human and mouse embryonic stem cells and genetically modified mouse models to dissect skeletal development and related diseases. She is a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea and was the first scholar in Hong Kong to hold the EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) Foreign Membership. The presence of scholars of Cheah's calibre shows that the School of Biomedical Sciences is not merely a vehicle for undergraduate teaching but a basic-research stronghold with a voice in the international academy — what it provides to the clinical departments' "world firsts" is the scientific foundation at the molecular and cellular level (for the clinical strengths, again see ./departments-and-strengths.md).

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# 6. Four schools at a glance: founding, clinical backing and research calling cards

Set the four "non-clinical" schools side by side and a clear division of labour and chronology emerges. Their institutional origins span more than a century, and the settings for their clinical training differ too — some lean on hospitals, some on laboratories, some on cross-border collaboration.

A few comparisons worth noting:

• The oldest and the newest coexist: the School of Biomedical Sciences' bloodlines (anatomy, physiology) are almost as old as HKU (1911), yet it is the last of the four to take the name of "school" (2015); the School of Chinese Medicine (1998) and the School of Nursing (department in 1995, school in 2010) were the two first non-clinical schools to take institutional shape.
• Three routes to clinical backing: nursing relies on local teaching hospitals; Chinese medicine runs a dual track of "mainland clerkships + a local Chinese medicine hospital from 2025"; biomedical sciences simply has no clinical arm and is rooted in the laboratory. The "clinical" of public health is the city's epidemic scene itself.
• One faculty, distinct mandates: all four schools sit under the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, yet each presents itself to the world through its own metric — nursing research, public health subject rankings, the evidence-basing of Chinese medicine, basic biomedical science — and together they form the different fulcra of the Faculty's "clinical – population – basic" spectrum. For the Faculty's overall structure, see ./li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md; for the teaching hospital system, see ./teaching-hospitals.md.

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# 7. Cross-references

• Faculty structure, overview of the five schools, MBBS: ./li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md
• Full institutional history of the School of Nursing (department in 1995, school in 2010, nursing workforce policy): school-of-nursing-history.md
• Research strengths of the clinical departments (infectious diseases, liver transplantation, etc.): ./departments-and-strengths.md
• Teaching hospitals (Queen Mary, Shenzhen, etc.): ./teaching-hospitals.md
• Faculty of Dentistry: ./faculty-of-dentistry.md
• University-wide research: ../04-research/

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