Academic Staff

Professor Ivy Zhao obtained her BSc in Nursing from Wuhan University, China; MSc in Health Promotion from The University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), United States; and PhD in Nursing from Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand. She received her postdoctoral training in School of Nursing, PolyU. Before coming to Hong Kong, she also worked in Age Concern Auckland, a nationwide NGO providing specialized services and support for older adults in New Zealand.  Ivy is a visiting fellow at the Manchester Centre for Audiology and Deafness (ManCAD), University of Manchester.

Ivy is a dedicated researcher focusing on improving cognitive health, loneliness and healthy ageing for older adults. She has developed expertise in age-related hearing loss, hearing-cognitive training, and the balance training of older adults with hearing loss. She has been actively developing various home-based social robot-assisted interventions for improving loneliness, depressive symptoms and physical activity in older adults and their family caregivers. She is also developing an fMRI paradigm to explore functional brain network engagement in relationship to changes in loneliness and cognitive performance after a robot-mediated interactive intervention. Ivy has successfully secured funding from the Research Grant Council General Research Fund (GRF), Health and Medical Research Fund (HMRF) and HMRF Fellowship Scheme as Principal Investigator to support her robotic and hearing health studies.

To fill the service gap in Hong Kong and internationally, as the first inventor, she and her team have developed a web-based gamified hearing-cognitive dual-task training system 聽聰智明 (Patent: HK30110757) for older adults with hearing loss. The study team has received the 1st runner up Award and Co-innovation Award in Health Future Challenge 2023 of PolyU and Translational Research Grant from the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences. She has also successfully secured HK$1,077,651 external funding to integrate AI into hearing-cognitive training and to conduct a three-year longitudinal hearing rehabilitation study across Hong Kong.

Ivy is the Deputy Director of World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Community Health Services (WHO CC). She serves as an ICOPE trainer, supporting the implementation of the Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) model in the Western Pacific Regions. She currently maintains extensive collaborations with local and international healthcare stakeholders, government authorities, and community organizations to facilitate the adoption and integration of the ICOPE model into existing healthcare systems.

Ivy is currently accepting PhD students. If you are interested, please kindly submit your CV via email, along with a statement outlining your research interests.

• Visiting Fellow, University of Manchester
• PhD, Auckland University of Technology
• Master of Science (Full Scholarship), University of Mississippi
• Bachelor of Science, Wuhan University