PEOPLE

Jasper Zhao Zhen WU is a sociolinguist interested in language policy and health communication. He joined the interdisciplinary team at CHM (previously under HKU RIICH) at the University of Hong Kong in 2025, after receiving his PhD at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Wu has worked on regulative linguistic and multimodal practices in business incubation. His latest projects focus on the topics of youth development, mental health, and human-AI communication. He specialises in ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to language, guided by assemblage thinking. Dr. Wu studies sociolinguistic dynamics in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), and with expanding interests in other regional clusters in Greater China and neighbouring regions in Asia. He has published in high-impact international journals, including Language in Society, Language Sciences and BMC Psychology, with an invited chapter submitted to the Cambridge University Press handbook series and two other manuscripts in preparation. At CHM, Dr. Wu primarily works on discourses of mental health emerging from intensifying cross-cultural contacts in the GBA and the increasing prominence of human-AI engagement. His research aims to bring closer collaboration between humanities research, business innovation and policy-making. 

Flora is currently pursuing an MA in Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong after completing her BA in English at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU). Her research interests centre broadly on pragmatics, specifically cross-cultural communication and discourse analysis. Her master’s dissertation is a comparative study of face and politeness strategies in social media request responses between China and US. Before joining the RIICH project, she held research assistant positions at CityU, exploring culture-language links to mental health perceptions, AI applications in education and sustainability in luxury brands. Her cross-disciplinary experience in linguistics helped her develop insights to bridge theoretical frameworks with diverse contexts and domains.

Farrukh is a current student at The University of Hong Kong, majoring in Business Analytics. His academic interests lie between finance, economics, and data analytics, where he focuses on applying quantitative methods to real-world problems. Outside of his research, he balances his academic rigor with a disciplined athletic lifestyle, regularly engaging in team-based and individual sports such as football and tennis. He also has a strong interest in 20th-century history, reflecting a broader curiosity about global events and their long-term economic and societal impacts.