Press Release

(Hong Kong – 14 October 2019) The Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education HKAGE (HKAGE) announced today its entering into a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Regensburg (UREG) on the partnership in the Global Talent Mentoring Hub (Global Talent Mentoring) which aims to provide research-based online mentoring for a highly selective group of outstanding youths from around the world free of charge. HKAGE will nominate exceptionally outstanding gifted students in sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) to this highly competitive programme, of which its mentee-to-population ratio reaches about 1 in 5 million.

The HKAGE has endeavoured to provide various types of learning experiences for gifted students in hopes of enhancing their learning enjoyment and widening their horizons. In addition to the current mentoring programme, the Hong Kong Gifted Apprentice Programme (HKGAP), which engages high- calibre leaders of different fields in the local community to give one-on-one mentorship to gifted students with specified interests and devotions, the new collaboration on Global Talent Mentoring will further enhance HKAGE’s mentoring programmes by enriching diversities in many aspects including cultures and disciplines.

Global Talent Mentoring provides one-on-one mentoring by the world’s leading STEMM experts and a suitable talent-development infrastructure with individualised learning pathways, created and supervised by mentors and coaches. Additionally, mentees will build a network within a global community of STEMM talents and scientists through working on individual and interdisciplinary STEMM projects. Mentoring will start in upper-secondary education and continue through the completion of advanced university studies or other expert achievements in STEMM.

Global Talent Mentoring will launch in late 2020 and the HKAGE will start to nominate suitable candidates for the mentoring programme by the first quarter in 2020.

The Global Talent Mentoring Hub directed by Prof Dr Heidrun Stoeger of the UREG is a flagship offering of the future World Giftedness Center (WGC), a project by the UNESCO-recognised Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation for Distinguished Academic Performance. In addition to the team directed by Prof Dr Stoeger, two additional teams are preparing various other parts of the WGC, a team directed by Prof Drs Albert Ziegler at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Nuremberg, Germany) and a team directed by Dr Mariam AlGhawi at the Hamdan Foundation in Dubai (UAE) respectively.

The Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education, a subvented non-governmental organisation, was established in 2008. It aims at serving the education sector in Hong Kong, offering high quality information and appropriate learning opportunities to students, teachers, parents and other stakeholders engaged in gifted education. Most of its programmes are provided free-of-charge.

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