Hong Kong program marks ten years with a global cohort of policy fellows

The Asia Global Institute at The University of Hong Kong has announced the arrival of its 2026 cohort of AsiaGlobal Fellows, a milestone moment for a program that is now entering its tenth year. Sixteen mid-career professionals drawn from thirteen countries and territories will spend nearly two months in residence in Hong Kong, from September 21 to November 13, 2026, participating in an intensive fellowship designed to examine global policy challenges through Asian perspectives. The announcement, made by the institute in late September 2026, also carries a symbolic weight: a decade after the fellowship welcomed its first participants, its alumni network now spans 120 fellows across 60 countries and territories, making it one of the more geographically diverse mid-career policy programs in the Asia-Pacific region.

This year’s intake is notable for the breadth of new ground it covers. The 2026 cohort introduces fellows from four countries that had never been represented in the program before: Bulgaria, New Zealand, Thailand, and Venezuela. That expansion pushes the fellowship’s cumulative footprint to its current total of 60 countries and territories, a figure that underscores how a program rooted in Hong Kong has gradually woven itself into policy, business, and civil society networks on nearly every continent. For the institute, the widening map is more than a statistic; it reflects the premise on which the fellowship was built, namely that the complex problems confronting governments and economies in the 2020s cannot be understood from any single regional vantage point.

The professional depth of the cohort is striking. On average, the 2026 fellows bring nineteen years of professional experience to Hong Kong, drawn from public policy, business, civil society, and multilateral organisations. That figure places the group firmly in the mid-career bracket that the program targets: individuals senior enough to shape decisions within their own institutions, yet early enough in their trajectories for an intensive period of cross-cultural exchange to alter how they approach those decisions. The fellowship’s model rests on the idea that policy innovation travels through people rather than documents, and that embedding experienced practitioners in a shared residential environment produces conversations and collaborations that conventional conferences rarely achieve.

Professor Heiwai Tang, Director of the Asia Global Institute, Victor and William Fung Professor in Economics, and Associate Vice-President (Global) at HKU, welcomed the incoming group and framed the program’s continuing mission. We are pleased to welcome this international group to HKU, he said. The AsiaGlobal Fellows Program continues to analyse complex global issues through Asian perspectives, facilitating the cross-cultural dialogue needed to address modern policy challenges. His comments position the fellowship within a broader intellectual project: the effort to build analytical frameworks for globalisation, trade, technology governance, and sustainable development that take Asian experience and Asian voices as central rather than peripheral to the conversation.

The individual profiles within the 2026 cohort illustrate the range of expertise the program has assembled. Among the selected fellows is Angel Eduardo Cardenas Sosa, a Venezuelan finance executive who manages a transport, energy, and digital infrastructure portfolio valued at more than twelve billion dollars for CAF, the development bank of Latin America. His presence in Hong Kong links the fellowship directly to the financing questions that dominate infrastructure policy across emerging economies, from how to fund resilient energy grids to how digital connectivity can be extended to underserved populations. Infrastructure finance has become one of the defining policy battlegrounds of the decade, and a fellow with hands-on responsibility for a multibillion-dollar portfolio brings practical weight to those discussions.

Another fellow, Priscilla Gatonye of Kenya, serves as a UNESCO-UNEVOC officer coordinating global Technical and Vocational Education and Training policy across a network of more than 250 centres. Her work sits at the intersection of education policy, labour markets, and international development, a space that has grown increasingly consequential as economies worldwide grapple with skills gaps, automation, and the transition to greener industries. Calum Handforth, a British specialist with the United Nations Development Programme, adds a technology governance dimension to the cohort; he has advised heads of state on artificial intelligence governance across nearly forty countries. As governments race to establish regulatory frameworks for AI, the presence of someone who has worked directly with national leaders on these questions gives the 2026 cohort a front-row perspective on one of the most contested policy domains of the era.

The cohort also bridges the worlds of technology entrepreneurship and international commerce. Mika Noh, a South Korean tech entrepreneur, is the founder of AI Culture Lab, an organisation pioneering the application of artificial intelligence, culture, and digital media to drive regional creative industries. Her work reflects a growing recognition that AI is not solely a regulatory or industrial challenge but also a cultural force reshaping how content is produced and consumed. Raquel Ramirez, an American vice-president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, drives national policy advocacy, government relations, and market access for a network of more than 1,700 European companies. Her vantage point on the commercial and diplomatic frictions between major economies offers the group a grounded view of how trade policy is negotiated and experienced at the level of individual firms.

During their eight-week residency, the fellows will live and work in Hong Kong, immersing themselves in the city’s distinctive position as a hub where East Asian, Western, and global currents of commerce, finance, and governance converge. The program’s structure typically combines seminars, field visits, and collaborative projects, encouraging fellows to test their assumptions against the perspectives of peers from radically different professional and national contexts. The institute has confirmed that the 2026 fellows are available for media interviews, academic panels, and speaking engagements throughout their stay, a provision that opens their expertise to journalists, researchers, and the wider Hong Kong public while the cohort is in residence.

The Asia Global Institute itself occupies a specific niche in the landscape of policy research. An independent think tank based at The University of Hong Kong, it generates and disseminates innovative thinking and policy-relevant research on global issues from Asian perspectives, with the stated aim of informing global policy and actions towards a prosperous and sustainable future for all. The fellowship is among its flagship activities, and the tenth-anniversary cohort arrives at a moment when the demand for such convening power appears to be growing. Questions of AI governance, infrastructure finance, vocational education, and trade diplomacy, all represented within this single cohort, are precisely the issues on which international coordination has struggled in recent years, and programs that build durable personal networks across borders argue that they offer a corrective to that fragmentation.

As the 2026 fellows settle into their Hong Kong residence, the tenth edition of the AsiaGlobal Fellows Program stands as a case study in how a regional institution can cultivate a genuinely global community of practice. From its base at HKU, the program has grown from an initial experiment into a network of 120 alumni across 60 countries and territories, now joined by a new class whose members manage billion-dollar portfolios, coordinate United Nations policy networks, advise heads of state, and build companies at the frontier of artificial intelligence. Whether the next decade of the fellowship can match the geographic and professional expansion of its first ten years remains to be seen, but the 2026 cohort suggests that the institute’s core proposition, that global problems demand dialogue conducted from Asian perspectives, continues to attract accomplished practitioners from around the world.

Subject of Research: The 2026 AsiaGlobal Fellows Program at the University of Hong Kong and its international cohort of mid-career policy professionals

Article Title: Marking a decade of impact: HKU welcomes 2026 cohort of AsiaGlobal fellows

Article References: Marking a decade of impact: HKU welcomes 2026 cohort of AsiaGlobal fellows. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: AsiaGlobal Fellows, University of Hong Kong, Asia Global Institute, policy fellowship, global governance, artificial intelligence, infrastructure finance, vocational education, international trade, Hong Kong, cross-cultural dialogue, mid-career professionals