Grants and Writing Resources for The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

A Year 4 undergraduate in HKUST's Division of Integrative Systems and Design won the championship of the 2026 Kerry Holdings Limited Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Award for work on predicting hand motion to adapt smartphone interfaces. The field drew on more than 600 UROP projects from the two previous academic years. That May, a PhD student took the Best Poster Award at IEEE ISPSD 2026 in Las Vegas.

Undergraduate Research

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) has run since 2005. Undergraduates take on tailor-made research projects under the supervision of HKUST researchers, and the program runs in the summer term as well as fall and spring. Project abstracts appear in the program's own proceedings; the UROP Proceeding 2024-25 groups them by school, from Science and Engineering to Humanities and Social Science.

The UROP awards and sponsorships page lists what follows a finished project. Students who complete UROP courses can be considered for the Kerry Holdings Limited award. A lead, presenting author with an accepted conference poster or paper can apply for the UROP Research Travel Sponsorship of HK$20,000, and a lead author with a paper accepted by an international journal can apply for the UROP Publication Sponsorship.

Fellowships and Graduate Funding

Research postgraduates are funded through Postgraduate Studentships, which cover living costs and tuition, and through the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme and the RedBird PhD Award Program. HKPFS awardees also receive a Conference Travel Grant. Local students in full-time UGC-funded MPhil and PhD programs can have tuition waived under the Tuition Waiver Scheme.

Two awards on the Graduate School's other funding page pay for time away from campus. The Global Research Award for PhD Students gives PhD students research experience in a foreign culture and environment. The UGC Research Travel Grant helps students travel to present HKUST research at conferences, with up to two authors per paper eligible.

Help With Writing

The Center for Language Education runs Language Advising, 30-minute one-to-one sessions, booked through a registration form. Advisers help at any stage of an assignment, from reading the task to planning and revising, and they point out language issues so students can edit their own work. The CLE's Language Commons, Room 3018, has meeting rooms students can book for rehearsing presentations.

For research students, the CLE's postgraduate course list includes LANG 5005 Communicating Research in English, a one-credit course on presenting research to academic, cross-disciplinary and general audiences. It's graded pass or fail.

Where Theses Are Published

Master's theses and doctoral dissertations go into HKUST SPD, the Institutional Repository. The library's Electronic Theses guide explains that full text is open to all for many records, where the author permits, and that other theses can be requested through interlibrary loan.

Students publishing journal articles should check the library's Open Access Publishing Agreements, under which eligible HKUST corresponding authors can publish open access in covered journals at no cost, within each agreement's quota. The library's Researchers' Series Workshops follow the research cycle, and some sessions count toward the Professional Development Course for research postgraduates.

Our editors work with HKUST writers at the final-draft stage, from seminar papers to dissertations. See our Hong Kong University of Science and Technology dissertation and thesis editing page, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.