umagazine issue 18 48 Life Is about Impact on Other Lives Dynamics between people often produce unpredictable outcomes and uncanny effects. Yuen is a believer in ‘one life impacting other lives’. This belief underlines his mission as a teacher. ‘Even if you manage to publish 200 academic papers, they may not amount to much. But if you could change and improve a single life, the gratification would be far greater,’ he says. ‘I am especially happy when students come up to me and tell me that I have opened their eyes to the essence or magic of mathematics. Education is about changing lives.’ Over the years, it has been Yuen’s practice to select one or two outstanding students as his mentees. These lucky individuals are, needless to say, typically academically gifted students. But there are exceptions. One of them is his student Mu Heqing, whose academic performance was not the most impressive. But in his after-class discussions with this student, Yuen discovered that Mu had other gifts; he had a mind of his own. Yuen trusted his instinct that ‘doing research is a different kettle of fish from mere book learning’. Earning good grades is not the same as being a good researcher. Yuen decided to take Mu under his wing. Not only that, he recommended his mentee for two six-month exchange programmes that covered stints at both the Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley. The lucky student even had the privilege of studying under Yuen’s former teacher James Beck. Upon earning his PhD at UM, Mu landed a teaching job at the South China University of Technology, where he was promoted to associate professor within 18 months. In 2015, on the basis of their previous research collaboration, Yuen and Mu jointly created a system for real-time structural health monitoring, thus laying the foundation for a paper that was later published by the authoritative Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering. That paper was the second most cited among 120 others published by the journal in 2015 and 2016. Yuen pours his heart into mentoring and inspiring his students, making him one of the most popular teachers in FST. He not only teaches theories, but also stresses the importance of application and implementation. Figuratively, he has taken his students out of the ivory tower. While on UM’s former campus, Yuen and his students spent five years on all-weather monitoring of the condition of the East Asia Hall, studying the long-term structural effects of temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors. His team even observed the extreme behaviour of the building under severe storm conditions. At Yuen’s urging, his student, Ms Kuok Sin-Chi, also took part in the National Challenge Cup, and won first prize, the first-ever such award by a Macao student. 阮家榮教授是澳大首位 35 歲前晉升的正教授 Prof Yuen Ka Veng is the first scholar at UM to become a full professor before the age of 35 阮家榮教授與其研究團隊 Prof Yuen and his research team
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