Vice President (Student and Global Affairs)

Professor Ben Young is Vice President (Student and Global Affairs) and Chair Professor of Steel Structures at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). He oversees institutional policies and strategies for student development, cultural promotion, and global engagement initiatives in education, including building partnerships with leading universities and strategic partners worldwide, as well as attracting and recruiting high-calibre students from around the globe. Before joining PolyU, Professor Young was a professor of structural engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) from 2005 to 2018. He was the founding Warden of Suen Chi Sun Hall from 2005 to 2014 and Master of the Graduate House from 2015 to 2018 at HKU. Professor Young was also the Warden of Hall #3 at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) from 2003 to 2004. He was previously an adjunct professor at Zhejiang University and a guest professor at Tongji University. Professor Young received his BSc, BEng, and PhD degrees from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 1991, 1993, and 1998, respectively.

Professor Young represented the Graduate School of HKU and participated in the “Framework for the Internationalisation of Doctoral Education (FRINDOC)” project from 2012 to 2015 as one of the six steering committee members and the only committee member from Asia. The FRINDOC project was initiated by the European University Association (EUA), which comprises more than 800 higher education institutions across 48 European countries. The aim of the project was to develop an online tool for universities to aid planning and implementation of internationalisation strategies for doctoral education and to identify good practices.

Alongside his work in advancing internationalisation and student development in higher education, Professor Young is well acquainted with academic research and actively serves on important academic panels in various government agencies and non-governmental organisations. He was a panel member for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2014 in the Built Environment Panel under the University Grants Committee (UGC), Hong Kong. He was also a member of the Accreditation Advisory Board under the Innovation and Technology Commission, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). Additionally, Professor Young served as a panel member for the General Research Fund (GRF) in the Engineering Panel of the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong from 2010 to 2016. He was one of the code writers for the “Hong Kong Code of Practice for the Structural Use of Steel” published by the Buildings Department, the Government of the HKSAR. Professor Young is currently an advisory member of the Committee on Structural Stainless Steel, the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), and serves as a committee member for the SEI/ASCE-8 Specification for the “Design of Cold-formed Stainless Steel Structural Members”, American Society of Civil Engineers.

Professor Young has been elected as a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA). His research interests include cold-formed steel structures, testing and design of steel structures, high strength steel structures, stainless steel structures, aluminium structures, structural stability, and fire resistance of metal structures. He is currently a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Constructional Steel Research, Elsevier. He also serves as a member of editorial boards for several SCI-indexed journals. Professor Young has published over 750 international journal and conference papers, of which over 410 are SCI-indexed journal papers. He has an h-index of 80 in Scopus. According to the ISI’s essential science indicators, Professor Young has been listed by Clarivate Analytics as among the “Top 1% scholars” worldwide by citations for many years.

Professor Young received the Bechtel Foundation Engineering Teaching Excellence Award in 2003, and the Michael G. Gale Medal for Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004 from HKUST. He also received multiple awards from HKU, including the Best Teacher Award in 2006, the Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2006, the Outstanding Teaching Award in 2008, the Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award in 2015, and the Outstanding Researcher Award in 2017. Professor Young received the Best Paper awards from the Journal of Structures and Journal of Engineering Structures, Elsevier, in 2016 and 2024, respectively. In 2020, he received the Shortridge Hardesty Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers for his research contributions to the stability design of cold-formed steel and stainless steel structures.