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Education
Profiles tagged “Education”.
6 profiles
Leong Pei Wan: the centenarian educator, poet and calligrapher who bridged a Macao century
Leong Pei Wan
Leong Pei Wan (born Leong Long Kwong, 1907–2010), a native of Yongchun, Fujian, was an educator, poet, calligrapher and public figure who lived to 103. Educated in his youth at Waseda University in Japan, he founded and served as principal of Liming Senior Middle School in Quanzhou in 1930, and later led overseas Chinese schools in Indonesia and Malaysia and the National Coastal Frontier School. From 1966 he was assigned by Liao Chengzhi to handle returned-overseas-Chinese work in Macao, where he settled long-term, chairing the Macao Returned Overseas Chinese Association and leading cultural bodies such as the Macao Chinese Language Society and the Macao Cultural Research Association; in later life he revived Liming University as its board chairman and principal. A member of the 6th, 7th and 8th National CPPCC, he received the inaugural Macao SAR Silver Lotus Medal in 2002 and the Grand Lotus Medal of Honour in 2007.
Lau Sin Peng: the Macao educator who archived a city's schooling in a 48-year career and a History of Macao Education
Lau Sin Peng
A veteran Macao educator and historian of education. Born in 1934 in Zhongshan, Guangdong, she moved to Macao in 1950 and devoted more than forty-eight years to Macao's Chinese-language education. From 1984 to 2000 she was principal of the Commercial Night Secondary School attached to the Macao Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, and long served as President of the Macao Chinese Educators Association, a standing member of the Macao Education Committee, and a member of the MSAR Preparatory Committee. Through part-time study from 1985 to 1993 she earned a master's degree in education from South China Normal University in Guangzhou. She is the author of A History of Macao Education (People's Education Press, 2002) and Traces of a Century: A Chronicle of 20th-Century Macao Education, systematic works on the local lineage of Macao schooling; she received the Macao SAR Medal of Merit – Education in 2001.
Xu Ao'ao: the solar physicist who built a decade of Macau University of Science and Technology
Xu Ao'ao
The 2nd President of the Macau University of Science and Technology (2002–2012), Xu Ao'ao is an astronomer and higher-education leader. Born in 1940 in Changzhou, Jiangsu, he graduated from the astronomy department of Nanjing University in 1962 and stayed on to teach, working for decades in solar physics, space physics, and plasma physics; he later became a professor and doctoral supervisor in astronomy and served as provost and vice-president of Nanjing University. In 2002 he became President of MUST, succeeding founding president Chow Lai-ko, and over the next decade helped grow the comprehensive university — founded in 2000 — in disciplinary strength and scale, stepping down in 2012 and later serving as adviser to the MUST chancellor. He was a member of the 9th and 10th National CPPCC.
Wei Zhao: the computer scientist who moved the University of Macau onto its Hengqin campus
Wei Zhao
The 8th Rector of the University of Macau (2008–2017), Wei Zhao is a computer scientist. He earned a B.S. in physics from Shaanxi Normal University (1982), then an M.S. (1983) and PhD (1986) in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Before Macau he chaired the computer-science department and served as senior associate vice president for research at Texas A&M University, and was dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As Rector he led the construction of the new Hengqin campus and the 2014 relocation, transforming UM from a local institution into a comprehensive university with Asian influence; he is an IEEE Fellow (2001). He stepped down at the end of 2017 and joined the American University of Sharjah as Chief Research Officer in 2018; the termination of his contract briefly became a public controversy and was the subject of a government-ordered investigation.
Yonghua Song: from British power-systems engineering to the rectorship of the University of Macau
Yonghua Song
The 9th Rector of the University of Macau, in office since 9 January 2018. A power-systems engineer who earned his PhD from the China Electric Power Research Institute in 1989, Song spent two decades teaching and serving as a pro-vice-chancellor across British universities (Brunel, Bristol, Bath, Liverpool), was Assistant President of Tsinghua University from 2009, and from November 2012 to December 2017 served as Executive Vice President of Zhejiang University, founding its International Campus in Haining. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2004), an IEEE Fellow (2008), and a Member of Academia Europaea (2019); his research concerns the safe and efficient operation of low-carbon power systems. He received the Macao SAR Medal of Merit – Education in 2023.
Agnes Lam: the communication scholar and poet who became an academic-legislator
Agnes Lam
Agnes Lam Iok Fong is a Macao scholar, poet and former directly elected member of the Legislative Assembly (2017–2021). An associate professor in the Department of Communication and assistant dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Macau, she researches the history of Macao's Chinese- and Portuguese-language press. Running under Macau Civic Power on her third attempt, she won a directly elected seat in 2017 — one of the few legislators in Macao drawn from academia — and focused in office on education, culture, media and urban development.