Professor Charles W. W. Ng is the Vice-President for Gradate Support at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) (HKUST(GZ)). He is also the Dean of HKUST Fok Ying Tung Graduate School, CLP Holdings Professor of Sustainability and a Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at HKUST.
Professor Ng earned his PhD degree from the University of Bristol, UK in 1993. After carrying out post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge between 1993 and 1995, he returned to Hong Kong to join HKUST as Assistant Professor in 1995 and rose through the ranks to become Chair Professor in 2011.
As a world authority on unsaturated soil mechanics, eco-geotechnics and engineering, and landslides, Professor Ng was elected as a Changjiang Scholar (Chair Professorship in Geotechnical Engineering) (中国教育部长江学者讲座教授), Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK, and Overseas Fellow of Churchill College, the University of Cambridge. He is a chartered civil engineer and also Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers. Professor Ng is the immediate Past President of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (2017 – 2022). Currently, he is an editor-in-chief of the prestigious Canadian Geotechnical Journal.
Professor Ng has supervised more than 80 PhD and 60 MPhil students to graduation and has published some 400 SCI journal articles and 250 conference papers and delivered more than 100 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, (ii) Advanced Unsaturated Soil Mechanics and Engineering and (iii) Plant-Soil slope Interaction and (iv) Advanced Unsaturated Soil Mechanics: theory and applications (2nd edition) by CRC: Taylor & Francis in 2007, 2019 and 2024, respectively.
He has received many awards including the 2025 Telford Gold Medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers, 2022 Varnes Medal by the International Consortium on Landslides, 2022 Fredlund Award from the Canadian Geotechnical Society, 2018 and 2022 Hong Kong Institution of Engineers Best Geotechnical Paper Awards, the 2017 Telford Premium Prize from the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Henry Adams Award from the Institution of Structural Engineers (UK), the first Tan Swan Beng Award from the Southeast Asian Geotechnical Society, and the R. M. Quigley Award from the Canadian Geotechnical Society four times for his four best papers published in 2007, 2012, 2016 & 2023. 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 (何梁何利基金科学与技术进步奖). He was also a recipient of the 2020 National Natural Science Award (2nd class) (中国国家2020年度自然科学二等奖（排名第1）) and the 2015 Scientific Technological Advancement Award (2nd class) by the State Council (中国国家2015年度科技进步奖二等奖（排名第4）), a recipient of Overseas, Hong Kong and Macau Young Scholars awarded by the National Science Foundation of China (国家杰青（海外）) in 2007 and a recipient of 2002 Mao Yisheng Youth Award (茅以升土力学及基楚工程青年奖) by the Chinese Institute of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering for significant contributions in Geotechnical Engineering.