Speakers

Professor Jay S. Siegel joined HKU in 2024 as a Professor in Chemistry and Senior Advisor to the President. He became the Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) in July 2025. A distinguished scholar in molecular design and synthesis, he specialises in structural chemistry and stereochemistry of supramolecular architectures.

Professor Siegel received his PhD from Princeton University in 1985, was a Swiss Universities Fellow at ETH Zurich from 1983 to 1984, and NSF-CNRS postdoctoral fellow at the University of Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg from 1985 to 1986. He began as Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1986 at the University of California San Diego, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992 and Full Professor in 1996. In 2003, he was appointed as Professor and Co-director of the Organic Chemistry Institute of the University of Zurich (UZH) and Director of its laboratory for process chemistry research. He served as Dean of Studies and Head of the Research Council for the Faculty of Sciences at UZH. He moved to Tianjin University in 2013 and was Dean of the School of Life Science and Dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology. He was Qianren Scholar from 2013 to 2015, and recipient of the Chinese Government Friendship Award in 2015. In 2018, he was named one of the 40 most influential foreign experts in China’s 40 years of Reform and Opening-up.

Professor Siegel received Presidential Young Investigator Award and has also been recognised as an American Cancer Society Junior Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He was elected an Arthur C. Cope Scholar by the American Chemical Society, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the American Chemical Society, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award Fellow. He was visiting professor at Princeton, Caltech, University of Basel, the Weizmann Institute and Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has served as President and member on numerous societies, foundation and journal advisory boards. He has run grant panels and award programmes for different institutions and funding bodies in the United States, France, Austria, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong.