Welcome to the Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas (EMIA) at HKUST!
It is a great privilege to serve as Head of EMIA and to build on the remarkable foundation laid by Professor Huamin Qu, who led the Division from its establishment in 2021. Under his leadership, EMIA grew from a bold institutional idea into a distinctive platform for interdisciplinary education and innovation at HKUST. I am deeply grateful for his vision and honoured to carry this work forward with our colleagues, students, and partners.
Disciplines organize what we already know. Emerging areas begin with what we do not yet know how to organize. EMIA exists for what is still taking shape.
Disciplines give us depth, methods, and communities of expertise. Yet some of the most consequential changes in knowledge begin before there is a department, a curriculum, or even a shared vocabulary to hold them. An emerging area, as we understand it, is not merely one that is new or fashionable. It is one in which the questions are developing faster than the structures we have inherited to answer them. Artificial intelligence is no longer a matter of computing alone; it is changing how we create, communicate, discover, govern, and understand ourselves. Sustainability cannot be divided cleanly among science, economics, policy, and human behaviour.
EMIA's role is to recognize when new intellectual territory is beginning to form, and to give it room to grow before every pathway is in place.
Through the Individualized Interdisciplinary Major (IIM) and the Individualized Interdisciplinary Program (IIP), students build rigorous academic pathways around questions that established programs may not yet accommodate. Through our Extended Majors, or "Major + X", students retain the depth of a home discipline while engaging with fields still in motion. And through new interdisciplinary initiatives, faculty, students, and partners explore ideas that do not yet belong to any single department. In this sense, EMIA aims to be a home for knowledge before it has a home.
Disciplines and interdisciplinarity are not opposites, but parts of one intellectual ecosystem. Disciplines give knowledge depth. Interdisciplinarity gives it movement. Emerging areas give it new directions.
As Head, I hope to preserve what has always been essential to EMIA: its openness to questions before their answers are clear, to collaborations that may at first seem unexpected, and to people who see connections others have not yet seen. Some of the fields a university will one day take for granted may begin today as conversations between people who never expected to share an intellectual home.
We are here not only to teach the fields that already exist, but to help create the conditions from which the next fields of knowledge can emerge. I warmly invite our students, faculty, alumni, and partners to be part of that work.
Prof. Celine SONG
Head, Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas