STUDENT AND GRADUATE ACHIEVEMENTS Alumni Spotlight Prof. Gleb Papyshev Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science, HKUST For this Semester, we are glad to have Prof. Gleb Papyshev, a 2023 PhD graduate of PPOL and now Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science at HKUST, to share his success story, views on academic research, and more. Prof. Papyshev was born in Russia. In his early days, he excelled academically in high school, and when he won the FLEX Fellowship that sponsored him to exchange in the US, it became clear to him that being an academic would be his life-long career, having worked brie y in corporations that he did not enjoy much, reinforced this resolution. A good academic platform, to Prof. Papyshev, is extremely important and very bene cial to one’s career in the academe; he appreciates the way HKUST supports students, which allows students to focus on research and spare them nding means to sustain themselves (part-time jobs for instance) while doing PhD degrees. He said Hong Kong is internationally well-connected in academic activities that expose young scholars to top-notch research and provide them opportunities to learn from the best examples, which cannot be easily found elsewhere. He is appreciative of the PhD program offered by PPOL, which exposed him to a unique study experience; he pointed out that public policy is one of a few non-western-centric disciplines in social science that has the feature of not being dominated by the study of Western Europe and the US, as there are a wide variety of studies in China, Japan, India, etc. The interdisciplinary and all-encompassing nature of public policy, both in terms of the topics of investigation and the methodologies: qualitative, quantitative, computational, and a mixture of methods, is equally accepted in the academic community of public policy. To him, research in public policy means extra intellectual freedom, as the discipline has no embedded rigid hierarchy, unlike sociology, political science, or economics. He remarked that faculty and students of PPOL can be from distinctively different elds and backgrounds, and they are all able to work in the eld of public policy from different angles and perspectives. Prof. Papyshev found that his research projects in PPOL enabled him to contribute to the eld and gave him a sense of achievement during his days as a research student. The opportunity of working as a teaching assistant in PPOL made him exposed to various public policy topics, and he quickly familiarized himself with the eld during his PhD study, though challenging in the beginning. For a piece of advice to PhD students, Prof. Papyshev emphasized the importance of a healthy social life and setting boundaries between professional and personal roles for mental health, which will, in turn, positively impact one’s academic life. He encourages students to pursue topics they are truly interested in, disregarding the topics’ popularity, and this should be the basis of research throughout one’s academic career. 40
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