World-leading EV motor expert joins Hong Kong PolyU after 38 years in Britain

Zhu Ziqiang, one of the world’s leading experts in electric motor engineering, has left his four-decade career in Britain to take up a full-time position at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.In his new role as chair professor of electrical machines and control systems, Zhu will continue his long-standing work on high-efficiency permanent magnet motors, according to his faculty page on the PolyU website.Zhu spent 38 years at the University of Sheffield, where he eventually established what was known as the world’s largest research team, comprising multiple professors and more than 100 doctoral students, in permanent magnet motor systems.These motors, which use built-in magnets to generate motion, are a core technology behind electric cars, high-speed trains, wind turbines, robots and the latest household appliances.Zhu’s research has been widely adopted by industry, with collaborations spanning international companies like Siemens, Toyota, Rolls-Royce and Midea.He has repeatedly called on China’s electric vehicle industry to move beyond scale and invest in genuine technological innovation, telling the China-morning-post" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="12558" data-entity-type="organization">South China Morning Post in 2021 that domestic carmakers were falling behind foreign rivals.Zhu, who at the time was director of Midea’s motor research centre in Shanghai, said that while China dominated the global supply of rare earth metals used in permanent-magnet motors, its electric vehicle makers were lagging in core motor innovation.