47 umagazine issue 18 A life-transforming Teacher Yuen‘s own experience provides a good example of the importance of having a life-changing teacher. He specialises in earthquake engineering, specifically in Bayesian inference, uncertainty quantification, system identification, structural health monitoring, reliability analysis, and analysis of dynamical systems. His supervisor was the famous Prof James Beck, who in turn learned at the feet of Paul Jennings, California Institute of Technology's former provost and a student of the legendary George W Housner, the father of earthquake engineering. Housner’s life has become part of the folklore of this discipline, and he remained an active researcher into his late nineties. When he died, he made a substantial donation to the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute of Caltech. Yuen was profoundly inspired by this tireless and selfless scholar. He also benefited from the timely advice from an unlikely source. In 1998, on the eve of his graduation from a master’s degree programme at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yuen came knocking on the door of UM’s Faculty of Science and Technology for a job. To his surprise, the dean of the faculty, Prof Iu Vai Pan, gave him an unpalatable piece of advice: ‘This is a critical moment in your life. You should consider finishing your PhD studies before you take up an academic post.’ Yuen, who was always a straight-A student, was not accustomed to getting ‘no’ for an answer, and he left somewhat deflated. But he decided to heed the dean’s wise counsel and headed to the US for his doctoral studies. Research that Made His Peers Sit Up and Pay Attention During his study at Caltech, Yuen completed a number of papers, including one paper he co-authored with his supervisor James Beck. The first in the field of structural health monitoring to discuss model class selection, the paper was ranked among the ten most cited papers, out of several thousand, published by the Journal of Engineering Mechanics of the American Society of Civil Engineers. In the years that followed, he compiled his key research results into a book titled ‘Bayesian Methods for Structural Dynamics and Civil Engineering’, arousing tremendous interest in his field. In fact, the book became a classic. Looking back, Yuen says that he is glad he didn’t land a job at UM in 1998. With a master’s degree, he couldn’t have excelled beyond the post of lecturer, and would not have accomplished all the good things that followed. To this day, he is grateful to Prof Iu for his career-changing advice. 阮家榮教授的第一位碩士研究生施袁鋒（左）現為四川大學副教授 Prof Yuen Ka Veng’s first master’s student Shi Yuanfeng (left) is now an associate professor at Sichuan University 阮家榮與大弟子慕何青的論文獲美國 Nova 科學出版社選錄於地震 研究專書《Earthquake Engineering: New Research》. ‘Earthquake Engineering New Research’, a joint paper by Yuen Ka Veng and his student Mu Heqing, was selected for inclusion in a book published by the US Nova Science Publishers
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