How do you fight a fire on a ship carrying hundreds of lives and billions of dollars' worth of batteries while out at sea? The answer is you can’t, but you can make them far less likely with a mandatory declaration form requiring companies to disclose when batteries are being transported.

That’s one of the clever recommendations Professor Masaru Yarime’s students are working on to present to stakeholders as part of their capstone project.

Professor Yarime’s background sits in that interesting space between engineering, policy, and sustainability, and you can see how that shapes the way he approaches problems. Over the years, he has explored how companies and policymakers adopt and respond to innovation. Battery fires at sea are a good example of the challenges he studies, where trade-offs in complex problems are unavoidable. That sense of pragmatism defines both his research and his teaching, and it’s why his students get the opportunity to work on problems that may seem common but are very impactful. 

“A nuclear engineer who started getting bored working only on nuclear reactors and got fascinated by how this technology intertwines with international affairs and society” – that’s how Professor Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin describes his background.

He has a master’s in nuclear engineering from Tsinghua University and a PhD from Princeton University, where he worked with the world’s top physicists and policy experts on issues such as preventing nuclear war and understanding the future of nuclear energy.

His role at HKUST today allows him to continue that work while also helping students get the fundamentals right – that is, understanding the science behind the world’s most consequential technologies. By that, he means “really understanding them at the technical level. Once students really understand the science, they can grasp the policy issues and solutions tied to each technology much better,” he says.

Professor Troullioud de Lanversin will assign tasks like calculating how much uranium is needed to achieve a supercritical chain reaction. But he also emphasises the softer skills, such as communication.

In 2016, the US FBI wanted Apple to help “unlock” an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California. Apple resisted, and the courts stepped in, setting off a global debate over the balance between national security and privacy. 

This is the kind of case that Professor Xiaofan Zhao discusses in her classes. “The case method is the best way to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world application,” she says. “By analysing actual events, students develop critical thinking and decision-making skills, which allow them to handle the complexity and ambiguity in real-world policymaking.”

Professor Zhao would know. Her background cuts across both the US and China, starting in environmental engineering at Stanford before moving into management science, and then into the policy world in Beijing. She worked at major think tanks like the World Resources Institute, focusing on climate and energy policy, before going on to doctoral research at Tsinghua, looking at how governments and businesses respond to regulation.

Spoiler alert: it’s messy. And Professor Zhao makes sure her students are ready for this. Data falls short, and institutions behave unpredictably. That’s why, in class, she leans into that complexity.