Dreams take flight
Empowering underprivileged children to soar with transdisciplinary efforts
23 October 2025
This is part one of our series that talks to principal investigators of the four pioneering research projects that have received funds from the Research Grants Council’s under the Areas of Excellence Scheme and Theme-based Research Scheme 2025–26.
Whether it is children living in Hong Kong’s substandard subdivided flats or their peers from impoverished urban areas and remote rural villages across China, they often face one thing in common: a lack of high-quality cognitive stimulation. This means they could miss the critical window for brain development, impacting their language, cognitive and socio-emotional growth.
In a bid to tackle this nationwide challenge, Professor Patrick Wong Chun-man (above, left) and Professor Chen Si (right) from CUHK are spearheading an innovative project by leveraging technology and biological data to introduce early intervention in child development. They are venturing into Hong Kong and different parts of the Chinese Mainland, working with interdisciplinary experts and social organisations to make the change on the ground.
Professor Wong, Stanley Ho Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, notes that among children in resource-scarce environments, 45% are at risk of developmental delays – not due to inherent special learning needs but because of insufficient quality interaction with caregivers. Many children in China fall behind from the starting line, impacting their educational and career opportunities and in turn weakening the nation’s human capital. His project aims to support infants up to three years old and their caregivers by delivering guidance materials via a WeChat mini-programme, offering personalised training through low-cost neurological tests and artificial intelligence, and deploying teams on-site to train instructors who will able to support caregivers on a group basis.
“The most effective approach would be one-on-one guidance from qualified therapists or teachers, but this is costly and challenging to scale in resource-scarce areas,” Professor Wong explains. To address this, the team developed an online platform featuring short videos of simple games or storytelling to train caregivers to engage with children at home. “The power of caregivers playing with young children should not be underestimated. During play, children naturally enhance their language and cognitive development.”
The project aims to reach 10,000 children, with a first-year pilot involving 1,000 of them from low-income and middle-class families in Hong Kong, as well as those from low-resource areas of regions of the Chinese Mainland including Dazhou in Sichuan, Aksu in Xinjiang, Dehong in Yunnan, Gansu, Jilin, Chongqing and Beijing.
Another key feature is the use of biodata to allocate resources precisely. The team will collect neural data from children, using electroencephalography (EEG) tools to measure electrical activity in the brain, alongside behavioural data and family socioeconomic information, to build a large database. Through AI machine learning and deep learning, the team can predict children’s cognitive and language development. If EEG data shows weak speech responses from a child, interventions will be stepped up and personalised solutions will be recommended. “It’s like creating a digital twin brain for each child, allowing us to predict their developmental trajectory and ensure resources are directed where they’re needed most,” says Professor Wong.
The project will investigate neural plasticity – the ability of the brain to reshape itself through stimulation in early childhood. By tracking developmental changes in children, the team aims to answer a fundamental scientific question: why are certain interventions more effective in specific environments? The answers will provide a basis for future educational and social policies.
Innovative transdisciplinary collaboration
The Research Grants Council Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme review committee has recognised Professor Wong’s project as highly original and approved a one-year grant of HK$10 million, laying the foundation for the five-year study. The team, led by cognitive neuroscientists, linguists and early education specialists, collaborates with top experts in economics, paediatric medicine, neuroscience and bioinformatics.
Professor Wong focuses on studying the cultural and biological foundations of individual differences in language and cognition. Currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and the founding director of the Brain and Mind Institute, he works with transdisciplinary teams to develop personalised treatment plans for children with developmental disorders. His numerous accolades include a 2023 Gold Medal with Congratulations of the Jury at the 48th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.
Professor Chen, from the Department of Educational Psychology and the Brain and Mind Institute, also serves as co-principal investigator of this AoE project. She was the co-principal investigator of the Collaborative for Early Rural Education in China at Harvard Graduate School of Education in the US. For over a decade, she has worked with social organisations such as the China Development Research Foundation, the iRead Foundation and the Chen Yidan Foundation to conduct research on rural Chinese children’s development.
China’s largest study on the early development of children aged 0 to 3
Since the launch of the “Village Access Project ” in 2004, China has continuously advanced rural network infrastructure. By the end of February 2025, fibre broadband coverage in administrative and impoverished villages has reached over 98%, providing robust support for the team’s research in rural areas. (Editor’s note: An administrative village is the lowest level of rural administrative division in the Chinese Mainland.)
Professor Chen built a solid foundation for the current study with her earlier work evaluating how the “One Village, One Kindergarten” project in the Chinese Mainland provided low-cost, high-quality preschool education to 30,000 children aged three to six in remote, impoverished villages. Educational content must be relatable, she stresses, and dialect narration is particularly crucial. The team’s WeChat mini-meme supports multiple local dialects, such as Cantonese and Sichuanese, integrated with AI-assisted translation and lip-reading technology to make it accessible for parents with lower education levels. The system incorporates a “check-in” mechanism and sticker rewards to keep up their engagement.
She explains: “Parents only need five to 15 minutes daily to watch short, TikTok-style videos on the mini-programme to learn the interactive games and storytelling techniques.” Past experience shows that reading picture books to children is the most cost-effective method and, when parents ask open-ended questions, the quality of parent-child communication improves significantly.
The challenges of conducting such a precise, large-scale study, according to Professor Wong, lie in ensuring all researchers receive standardised training and maintaining the high quality of implementation of intervention and assessment as they travel across different areas of the country. The team has put a rigorous evaluation system in place, including video reviews, repeated training and regular meetings to help monitor research quality. To build trust with parents who might worry that EEG testing could affect their child’s brain development, the team demonstrates the safety of the tests in person while their local partners make an effort to reassure parents.
The team will engage a CUHK economist to calculate the study’s cost-effectiveness and assess the intervention’s impact on family income. Upon completion, the team plans to expand the project to developing countries in Southeast Asia. “This is not just educational intervention; it’s a social investment,” Professor Chan notes. “Our work is about giving every child a fair starting point.”
By Jenny Lau
Photos by Yau Hung Kee
