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Professor Peng Gong, Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Development) of the University of Hong Kong, has taken up the role as an Advisor to the prestigious international journal The Lancet. Professor Gong will be joining 17 other advisors in the Lancet’s International Advisory Board to give their expertise and advice on editorial matters.

The Lancet, founded in 1823, is an international weekly medical journal carrying published papers that have made a crucial contribution to science and human health. 

“It is a huge honour for me to have received the invitation to serve on The Lancet International Advisory Board. HKU researchers have published many important papers in the Lancet, which is one of the most prestigious journals in the world. I hope to enhance HKU’s strength by making more collaborative contributions in the environmental health area through bridging medical and environmental scientists,” said Professor Gong.

Peng Gong also serves concurrently as Chair Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences (Geography) and the Faculty of Science (Earth Sciences) at HKU. He was professor and Chair of the Department of Earth System Science, Dean of School of Sciences, at Tsinghua University in China. He had taught in the Department of Geomatics Engineering at the University of Calgary (Canada) between 1991 and 1994, and had been on faculty in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley (CA, USA) between 1994 and 2015. In 2004, he served as the founding director of the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University.

His major research interests include mapping and monitoring of global land cover and land use changes, climate change modeling, and modelling of environmentally related infectious diseases. He is the author/co-author of over 600 articles and 8 books. He co-chaired 8 Lancet Commission reports on climate change and health and healthy cities in China. He served as one of the nine members on the Board of Overseas Advisors to the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, and as vice Chair of the Committee for Urban Assessment of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of China.

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