Master of Public Policy (MPP) Info Session

Prof. Stuart Gietel Basten joined HKUST in 2017 as Associate Professor of Social Science and Public Policy. He has a joint appointment between the Division of Social Science in the School of Humanities and Social Science and the Division of Public Policy under the Interdisciplinary Programs Office. Prior to joining HKUST, he was Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford.

Prof. Gietel Basten's research covers the links between population and policy, with a regional focus on Asia. In particular, He is interested in the emergence of low fertility across the region, and the consequences of this in terms of population ageing and growth.
His research has been published in a number of major journals in demography and other social science subjects. In 2017, my first book, Why Demography Matters (co-written with Danny Dorling) was published. He is also a regular contributor to the South China Morning Post and China Daily.

At HKUST he teaches undergraduate courses in demography and social science research methods, while at the graduate level he teaches public policy research methods. He has also organized Executive Education courses in public policy on the topics of ageing and future policy planning.

He is also the Associate Director of the Leadership and Public Policy Executive Education Program and a Faculty Associate of the Institute of Emerging Market Studies.

Prof. Kira Matus' primary research focus is at the intersection of innovation, sustainability science, and public policy, focusing on sustainable production-consumption systems. A large portion of her research is on how policy interacts with the development and implementation of "green" technologies in supply chains, especially those that include the production and/or use of chemicals. She looks at how policy can incentivize innovation, but also at how innovation can feed-back into policy, and when new technologies allow for, and sometimes even demand, new approaches to policy on the part of public, private and civil society actors. This includes areas such as certification and voluntary regulatory tools, as examples of some of the different approaches being used to effectively regulation emerging technologies. She also has a longstanding interest in the use of scientific expertise in the policy process, which has led to work on the controversies surrounding efforts to control bovine Tb with the culling badgers in the UK and possums in the NZ.

Dr. Pengyu Zhu is the Associate Professor in the Division of Public Policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is the Co-Director of the Master of Public Policy Program at HKUST. Prior to joining HKUST, Dr. Zhu has been a faculty member in the Department of Community and Regional Planning at Boise State University, USA (2011-2016) and in the Department of Geography at University of Hong Kong (2017-2019). Dr. Zhu received his Ph.D. in Policy, Planning and Development from the Sol Price School of Public Policy at University of Southern California in 2011. He has taught courses on transportation and land use, transportation economics, economics applications to planning and policy, urban economics, urban geography, quantitative research methods, and urban design and site planning studios.

Prof. Naubahar Sharif is the Associate Professor in the Division of Public Policy and Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He earned his doctorate in ‘Science and Technology Studies’ from Cornell University (USA) in 2005 and completed the Executive Education program in ‘Innovation for Economic Development’ at Harvard University (USA) in 2011. He has published numerous research and theoretical articles in leading academic journals and has been awarded external funding from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong under the Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) scheme, the General Research Fund (GRF) scheme, and the Public Policy Research (PPR) scheme. Under the auspices of Hong Kong’s Central Policy Unit, Dr. Sharif has received funding (as a co-investigator) for a Strategic Public Policy Research (SPPR) proposal to study the potential of China’s One-Belt-One-Road initiative to benefit Hong Kong through trade and investment. Dr. Sharif also consulted for the Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC) of the HKSAR Government from 2006 to 2010. Currently in his research he focuses on innovation and technology policymaking in Hong Kong, the impact of the One-Belt-One-Road initiative in Pakistan, and also the process of industrial automation, including robotics, unfolding in Southern China.