Criminology
Prof. Dennis S.W. WONG, Ph.D., is currently Professor of Criminology & Social Work at Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences. He served as an associate dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences from 2012-2019 and the Acting University Librarian from 2019-2020. His areas of teaching and research are criminology, youth studies, parents-child relationships, conflict management, and restorative justice. Prof Wong is honorary consultant on youth drugs abuse, school bullying, and offenders’ rehabilitation for governmental organizations in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore. He is one of the founding members of Asian Criminological Society, an active member of Asia Pacific Forum of Restorative Justice, and chairman / board member for a number of non-governmental organizations. Apart from publishing articles in local and international journals, he has published six books related to youth delinquency, school bullying, alternative to prosecution, mediation, and restorative justice. His areas of teaching and research are criminology, youth studies, parent-child relationships, conflict management, and restorative justice.
Professor Matthew Manning is a criminological economist and future crime scholar. He was previously a full Professor of Criminology at the Australian National University. He has worked within the fields of criminology and economics for two decades. His current research focusses on how new technologies can be exploited by criminals to undertake money laundering, terrorism financing and fraud. Further, his empirical research evaluates strategies that can be employed by criminal justice actors to respond to these new and complex crimes. As a future crime scholar, he is committed to advancing knowledge about: (1) how individuals commit future crimes; (2) the processes that can be adopted to make committing future crimes more difficult, riskier and less rewarding; and (3) the tools that assist government and industry in making strategic economic decisions that create efficiency and enhance return on investment. He has published over 150 book chapters and papers within the fields of criminology, economics and public policy and has developed a number of economic tools that are beginning to incorporate machine learning algorithms. The cost benefit tools are currently hosted and used by a number of government agencies such as the College of Policing U.K (https://www.college.police.uk/research/practical-evaluation-tools). He has also developed online economic APPs to assist criminal justice actors in developing the economic evidence to make informed policy decisions (https://manningcba.digital).
Dr Rebecca Wong completed her Ph.D. studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are in the fields of green criminology, environmental crime, illegal endangered wildlife trade, criminal networks and issues of trust in the underworld. She is also an associate member of the Extra Legal Governance Institute and the Elephant Research & Conservation Network, University of Oxford.
Dr. Lena Zhong, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interest includes Chinese policing, crime prevention, drug abuse and crime, recidivism, and quantitative analysis of crime data.
Applied Sociology
Professor Xiaowei Zang is Chair Professor of Sociology, former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. He had been Professor of Chinese Studies and Head of the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield in the UK before joining CityU in August 2013. He has studied ethnicity and elite behaviour in China and has produced more than 120 research outputs including five authored books, 14 edited volumes, and many research papers in referred journals. His current research interests include governance in China and crime trends and patterns of recidivism in Hong Kong. Prof Zang is the only scholar in the category of Social Science in China, Hong Kong, and Macau to make to the list of top 2% of the most cited scientist (career impact 1960-2020) in the world in November 2021.
Dr. Jacky Cheung, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interest includes quality of life, moral development, work and management, citizenship, and youth resilience. He is an expert in applied sociological research and particularly specialised in quantitative data and statistical analysis.
Dr. Sai-fu Fung obtained his PhD from the University of Warwick. Dr. Fung teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses related to social research methods, digital sociology, political sociology, social problems, and issues in Chinese society. His research interests are in the fields of computational social science, health-related quality of life (HRQOL), digital health, and sports.
Dr. HO Wing Chung, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interest includes social problems and social, development in Chinese societies, and social and sociological theories.
Dr Lu's research focuses on social determinants of healthy ageing, with a special emphasis on how environmental (e.g., neighbourhood physical and social environment) and social-behavioural factors (e.g., civic participation and volunteering) shape well-being, physical and mental health in later life…
Mr. Stephen Ma is a Lecturer of Sociology at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include the sociology of the Internet, evaluation research, and sociology of work and organization.
Dr. Eileen Tsang, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interest includes cultural and political sociology of China’s emerging middle class, the sociology of gender and sexuality, sociology of consumption and popular culture, sociology of sex work, and migration, labor, and crime.
Psychology
I am a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the City University of Hong Kong. My primary research interest is in traumatology and resilience, in developing an in-depth knowledge about the factors that facilitate adjustments to life-threatening illnesses (e.g. cancer) and traumatic events (e.g. infectious disease epidemic). As a registered clinical psychologist and a researcher, I have benefits of conducting basic research to help understanding of applied problems as well as taking applied issues for explorations in empirical research. As a clinician, I have developed numerous therapy manuals related to my clinical interest. Examples include a grief therapy manual for bereaved adults after the SiChuan earthquake; intervention manuals to facilitate resilience for mother of children suffering from cerebral palsy, people receiving genetic colon cancer screening, and people recovered from psychiatric illnesses. I am serving as an advisor of Government departments and NGOs on both research and clinical practice, and I have been collaborating actively with my community partners to develop resilient and recovery programs for a variety of people with special needs. I have been conducting invited training workshops and presentations regularly in Hong Kong, China, Europe, and North America to share my research findings and clinical expertise.
Creativity has been a fascinating research topic for me as it often opens up new opportunities for interdisciplinary as well as cross cultural study.
Dr. Anna Hui is currently an associate professor and also the coordinator of the BDSS First Year Experience at the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong. Research interests include creativity and innovation; motivation and self-regulation, gifted and creativity education, lifespan development in creativity. She also servesd as the Chairperson of the Ad Hoc Committee of Reviewing the Curriculum Guide of Early Childhood Education, Curriculum Development Council of the Education Bureau, HKSAR.
I received my PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford. My research interests are in social cognition, focusing on the impact of social factors (social experiences, culture, etc.) on information processing, as well as the underlying mechanisms of information processing. I use a viariety of research methods such as behavioural, EEG, and surveys.
Dr Julian Lai obtained his Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Toronto. He joined the City University of Hong Kong to start his research career after graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a Ph.D. in psychoneuroimmunology. In addition to research on the psychophysiology of stress, he also engaged in research on topics associated with personality and social psychology, health psychology, and environmental psychology. One of Dr Lai's major contributions is the adoption of salivary cortisol as a biomarker to examine the health impact of personal and interpersonal characteristics in Chinese populations. He is also one of the few scholars who pioneered research on the psychosocial determinants of pro-environmental behavior in the Chinese people. His major publications appear primarily in international journals in psychology. Dr. Lai has been serving as an expert reviewer for a number of prestigious journals in psychology and related disciplines. He was the Editor of the official journal of the Hong Kong Psychological Society (2009-2012) and is a former president of the Hong Kong Psychological Society (2004-2005). He has been an honorary research fellow of the Center on Behavioral Health of the University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Lai also has extensive experience in teaching and program planning, especially in taught postgraduate programs. He served as the program leader of the Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology for a number of years and was in charge of converting the program to the MSocSc in Applied Psychology in 2009. He has been serving as the program leader of the master program since then. Dr. Lai's teaching expertise concentrates in areas such as biological psychology, behavioral neuroscience, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology (e.g., the interaction between the social environment and psychological processes in determining risk perception). He has also served as the external examiner of various courses and programs offered by other universities in Hong Kong.
Kin-Kit (Ben) Li joined the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences (formerly Department of Applied Social Studies) at City University of Hong Kong since 2009. He received his Ph.D. in sport and exercise psychology from Oregon State University in 2008. His research interests include sport and exercise psychology, physical activity promotion, vaccination, social gerontology, health communication, time perspective, and life-course theories.
I received my PhD in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2010. I worked as a research scientist (Post-doctoral fellow) at Temasek Laboratories, The National University of Singapore for three years before joining The Department of Psychology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. I joined the City Univeristy of Hong Kong since 2020. I apply multi-modal brain imaging and stimulation methods, including electroencephalography (EEG), event-related optical signals (FOS/EROS), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), to study the cognitive and neural architecture of the automatic/pre-attentive change detection system in human (which is also known as the mismatch negativity signal) for the normal, aging, and clinical populations.
Dr. Wang is a social psychologist, focusing on three broad research themes: 1) Objectification and Dehumanization; 2) Immoral Behaviour, Aggression, and Self-Interested Behaviour; 3) Inequality, Social Power, Social Dominance, and Hierarchy.
She uses a combination of methods, including laboratory and online experiments (e.g., face-perception, economic games, and behavioural paradigms), quasi-experiments/ special sample studies, surveys, and using ecological and archival data (e.g., Google Ngram).
I worked as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Education (Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences) and the Institute of Human Performance at the University of Hong Kong before joining the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong in 2013. My research interests include 1) Language processing, 2) Speech production, 3) Speech motor learning and control, 4) Stress and speech performance, 5) Visual word recognition, and 6) Communication disorders. I use both behavioral and cognitive neuroscience approaches in my study.
Dr. Joseph Wu is currently an associate professor at the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong. He is a registered teacher. He is an experienced teacher educator and has substantial knowledge in Hong Kong education system.
Sam Ye obtained his PhD from The University of Hong Kong. Before joining City University of Hong Kong, he was a Post-doctoral Fellow in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include human values, social beliefs, positive psychology, and psychometrics.
My research focuses on aging and work, with emphases on emotional well-being of middle-aged workers, and psychological adjustment to retirement.
Dr. Nancy Xiaonan Yu is a health psychologist with training in public health. Her research program has focused on resilience in adversities, by examining the resilience process and associated factors at the individual, dyadic, family, and community levels. Her resilience-oriented studies involve chronic illnesses (e.g., HIV, cancer, coronary heart disease), acculturation (e.g., migration, cross-border adjustment), losses (e.g., parental absence, bereavement), challenges (e.g., discrimination and stigma, parenting stress, aging), and crisis (e.g., natural disasasters). In addition, she has applied the community-based participatory research approach to develop and implement culturally sensitive interventions to promote resilience in stressful populations. With strong passion for interdisciplinary research, Dr. Yu has been working closely with researchers and practitioners in social work, public health, data science, and biomedical science.
I received my Ph.D. degree in Psychology from Dept. of Psychology at National University of Singapore. My research spans several areas in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, focusing on decision-making and social reasoning in different populations. I use model-based neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI/EEG) and paradigms from behavioral economics to better understand the neurocomputational bases of human decision-making in social contexts.
Social Work and Counselling
Before I joined the University, I have been a school social worker, the in-charge of a children and youth centre and a family centre for a number of years. I joined the City University of Hong Kong as a lecturer in the Division of Social Studies in 1993, was transferred to the Department of Social & Behavioural Sciences (formerly Department of Applied Social Studies) as an Assistant Professor in 2008 and retitled as an Associate Professor (B) in 2012. I was promoted to Associate Professor (A) in 2017. My mission is to improve the mental health of children and adolescents from family ecological and positive psychological perspectives. My research mainly focuses on the family ecological and positive psychological factors that are related to anxiety, depression and suicide of children and adolescents. In the past years, I have published 50 papers related to children and adolescent mental health problems, parenting and positive psychology in international refereed journals with high impact factor, i.e., Child Abuse and Neglect, Prevention Science, Research on Social Work Practice, Journal of Advanced Nursing, Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, Journal of Happiness Studies, Nursing Research, Social Indicators Research, Suicide and Life-threatening Behavior, Child Indicators Research, Journal of Positive Psychology, Children and Youth Services Review, Journal of Child and Family Studies. I was also invited as a guest speaker and a keynote speaker in about 60 conferences and symposiums. I have established the Positive Education Laboratory in 2015, aiming to promote positive education for the students, teachers, parents and the community. The laboratory has collaborated with about 200 local schools to launch positive education.
Research Interests/Areas
- Youth related concerns and issues
- Social work development in China
- Life of young migrant workers in China
- Significance of fieldwork practice
- Qualitative research methods
Prof. Dennis S.W. WONG, Ph.D., is currently Professor of Criminology & Social Work at Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences. He served as an associate dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences from 2012-2019 and the Acting University Librarian from 2019-2020. His areas of teaching and research are criminology, youth studies, parents-child relationships, conflict management, and restorative justice. Prof Wong is honorary consultant on youth drugs abuse, school bullying, and offenders’ rehabilitation for governmental organizations in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore. He is one of the founding members of Asian Criminological Society, an active member of Asia Pacific Forum of Restorative Justice, and chairman / board member for a number of non-governmental organizations. Apart from publishing articles in local and international journals, he has published six books related to youth delinquency, school bullying, alternative to prosecution, mediation, and restorative justice. His areas of teaching and research are criminology, youth studies, parent-child relationships, conflict management, and restorative justice.
Dr. Siu Ming CHAN worked as a frontline social worker in community settings for eight years before embarking on his academic journey. He served the underprivileged, including homeless people, low-income families living in cubicles and subdivided flats, poor children, and the elderly, through direct service, group work, and community organizing. He also conducted policy research and surveys related to vulnerable groups facing poverty, housing problems, and other community issues.
Discovering and appreciating positive outlooks on life within personal and contextual drawbacks, Dr. Chow is committed to infusing strengths- and meaning-based perspectives in shaping intergeneration exchanges, knowledge, capital, and life wisdom through her research scholarships, teaching, and delivering knowledge-transfer activities to achieve capacity-building. Her scholarship has created an impact on rethinking and shaping the knowledge of aging through narrative practice with older persons and caregivers who are confronted with late-life transitions, to reconstruct their meaning and purpose in life. She is committed to translating research to practice and transferring knowledge to ensure appropriate practice to prepare students, health and social care practitioners, patients in recovery, and the general public to rethink and shape knowledge of aging. With extended clinical practice in social gerontology, her current research interests are in narrative practice, life adversities and wisdom, spirituality and recovery, resilience and culture, and intergenerational capitals in promoting an age-friendly society. Her academic articles appear in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Oxford, SAGE, and Routledge journals. Esther has been invited to speak in Singapore, Japan, Beijing, Australia, Canada, and the USA. Her contributions have been recognized by the following awards: The Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America (2015), CADENZA fellow by Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust (2008), Research Fellow, HKU Sau Po Center on Aging (since 2009), and the Excellence in Knowledge Transfer Award by the City University of Hong Kong (2013 & 2021).
Dr Lu's research focuses on social determinants of healthy ageing, with a special emphasis on how environmental (e.g., neighbourhood physical and social environment) and social-behavioural factors (e.g., civic participation and volunteering) shape well-being, physical and mental health in later life…
Jerf Yeung joined the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences at City University of Hong Kong in 2013. He is a registered social worker and obtained his PhD in social work from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before teaching in university, he has engaged in social work services and related research since he graduated in social work from City University of Hong Kong and worked in the fields of youth, children and family, and elderly services. His research interests include family and children, religion and health, and adolescent health.
Dr. Shen (Lamson) Lin received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW). With interdisciplinary training in social work (FIFSW), gerontology (Institute for Life Course & Aging), and population health (Dalla Lana School of Public Health), Lamson's scholarship centers around social determinants of health, minority ageing, health and mental health equity.
More recently, Lamson's research has been using statistical and computational techniques to examine the mechanisms, risk and protective factors, through which the COVID-19 pandemic influences individuals' psychosocial wellbeing (e.g., anxiety disorders, loneliness, stigma, and vaccine hesitancy). As a first-generation college graduate from his family, Lamson recognizes social/structural vulnerability (e.g., racialized identity, migration status, job precairty) in shaping resource distribution, power dynamics and consequantial health inequalities across the human life course.
To date, Lamson has published 19 SCI/SSCI-indexed scholarly articles and his representative papers can be found in top-tier peer-reviewed journals across health and social sciences, including Journal of Affective Disorders, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (Oxford University Press), Ageing & Society (Cambridge University Press), Journal of Social Work, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. Prior to joining CityU, he was a course instructor teaching Social Work Practice in Health (MSW postgraduate course) at FIFSW since 2020.
Lamson has received multiple academic awards from professional organizations in North America, including the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) - 2018 Best Abstract Award (Gero-Ed Track), Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR)- 2019 Travel Grant, Society of Refugee Healthcare Providers (SRHP)- 2019 Best Original Research Award - and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) - 2020 Travel grant for CPHA Conference.
