
Past President of International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE).
Charles Wang-wai Ng
Professor Charles W. W. Ng is currently the Dean of HKUST Fok Ying Tung Graduate School, CLP Holdings Professor of Sustainability and Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is also the Vice-President for Gradate Support in our Guangzhou campus. He is the immediate past President of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (2017-2022). He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Geotechnical Journal.
Professor Ng earned his PhD degree from the University of Bristol, UK in 1993. After carrying out a period of post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge between 1993 and 1995, he returned to Hong Kong and joined HKUST as Assistant Professor in 1995 and rose through the ranks to become Chair Professor in 2011. Professor Ng was elected an Overseas Fellow by Churchill College, the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering. He is also a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers. According to the Stanford University published the top 2% Scientists Worldwide in September 2024, he is the only Chinese ranked within top five professors, in the category of career-long impact in the sub-fields: Geological & Geomatics Engineering; Civil Engineering.
Professor Ng has supervised more than 80 Ph. D and 70 M. Phil students to graduation from 23 countries and has published over 450 SCI journal articles and 250 conference papers with a total number of citations over 31,000 and H-index of 93. He has delivered more than 90 keynotes and state-of-the-art reports across the six continents. He is the main author of four reference books: (i) A Short Course in Soil-structure Engineering of Deep Foundations, Excavations and Tunnels by Thomas Telford in 2004, and (ii) Advanced Unsaturated Soil Mechanics and Engineering and (iii) Plant-Soil slope Interaction and (iv) Advanced Unsaturated Soil Mechanics: theory and applications by CRC: Taylor & Francis in 2007, 2019 and 2024, respectively.
Professor Ng has received many awards including the 2022 Varnes Medal by the International Consortium on Landslides, 2022 Fredlund Award from the Canadian Geotechnical Society for the most highly cited paper in 5 years, 2018 and 2022 Hong Kong Institution of Engineers Best Geotechnical Paper Awards, the 2017 Telford Premium Prize from the Institution of Civil Engineers. Moreover, he won the Teaching Excellent Appreciation Award for the academic year 2018-19 at HKUST. In the Mainland, he received the prestigious 2022 Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress. He was also a recipient of the 2020 National Natural Science Award and the 2015 Scientific Technological Advancement Award by the State Council.