HKU medical school dean Gabriel Leung resigns for Jockey Club post

Gabriel Matthew Leung, dean of the University of Hong Kong’s LKS Faculty of Medicine, has resigned and will leave the position next summer, the university’s president Zhang Xiang told students in an internal email.

The top epidemiologist Leung will join the Hong Kong Jockey Club as the new executive director for charities and community in July.

HKJC also issued a statement on its website, saying Leung will take up his role at the HKJC on 18 July 2022, succeeding Cheung Leong who will leave the club upon his contract expiry in August 2022. 

Leung will be a member of the Board of Management and report directly to the club’s chief executive officer, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges.

In the internal email to students yesterday, Zhang said the university will soon commence a global recruitment campaign for Leung’s successor.

Later yesterday, Leung announced his resignation “with a heavy heart” in an email to students, alumni and colleagues of HKUMed.

Leung said he as an epidemiologist and policymaker has spent “the best part of his career” on three major health challenges. 
This includes the “unfinished epidemic of infectious diseases” such as the Severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003 and the Covid-19, the “emergent epidemic of non-communicable diseases” like cancer screening and paediatric and life course research, as well as the “unnecessary epidemic of environmental insults” like tobacco control.

Leung, 49, has been the 40th dean of the university’s medical school since 2013. He has been teaching in the institution for 22 years.

Leung is currently one of the four government advisors on Covid-19, together with top microbiologist Yueng Kwok-yung and public health expert Keiji Fukuda, both of whom are also from HKU, as well as respiratory expert David Hui Shu-cheong from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

In 2017, when former HKU president Peter Mathieson resigned, rumors said Leung raced for the position and managed to become one of the two finalists, but eventually lost to Physics scholar Zhang.

Before becoming the medical school’s dean, Leung was the city’s first Under Secretary for Food and Health from 2008 to 2011 and the fifth director of the Chief Executive’s Office in 2011 and 2012.

Leung first graduated from the medical school at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He subsequently obtained a master degree of public health from Harvard University, United States and a doctoral degree of medicine in HKU.

Leung has been under limited registration with the Medical Council, and his current three-year registration will be valid until June 30 next year.

According to the council’s website, a practitioner under limited registration can only work full-time as a public doctor or researcher at the Hospital Authority, Department of Health, or the city’s two medical schools at the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.