Prof. Sun Xin Receives the PolyU Young Innovative Researcher Award (YIRA) 2026 and Early Career Research Excellence Award at ARWA 2026

Prof. Sun Xin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Language Science and Technology, has won the PolyU Young Innovative Researcher Award (YIRA) 2026.

The YIRA is a prestigious university-level award that honours young faculty members who have demonstrated originality, contributed to technological advancement, and propelled transformational innovation into solutions addressing global challenges through their research.

Prof. Sun is one of the six awardees among the 60 submissions across all schools and faculties. Her winning research project is titled “Brain Basis of Dyslexia in Chinese-English Bilinguals: Phonological and Morphological Assessments Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.” It introduces a novel, evidence-based neuroimaging approach using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to probe two underlying oral difficulties that are precursors to and associated with dyslexia, phonological and morphological processing. The objective is to characterise the neurocognitive profiles of Chinese-English bilingual children with dyslexia. In the long term, these neurobiological insights have the potential to assist early identification strategies and support the development of targeted interventions for bilingual paediatric populations in Hong Kong and globally.

Earlier this year, Prof. Sun was also honoured with the Early Career Research Excellence Award in the 10th Annual Conference for the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia (ARWA 2026). This award aims to recognise a talented early-career researcher who shows outstanding research potential in an area of reading and writing research that is related to Asia. The ARWA, registered as a society in 2016, is for researchers studying literacy development, literacy impairment, or expert linguistic processing via print in Asia.