Lam Woo & Co Ltd Chair Professor of Psychology

Prof William G. Hayward 

Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences

Professor William Hayward is Dean of Social Sciences and Lam Woo & Co Ltd Chair Professor of Psychology at Lingnan University. Before joining Lingnan, he was Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, and Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as well as holding academic appointments at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Wollongong, Australia.

A native of New Zealand, he holds a BA and MA from the University of Canterbury, and a PhD in Psychology from Yale University, USA.

With a career in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, Professor Hayward’s research focuses on how we achieve understanding of the world around us through our use of visual information; in particular, he measures both behaviour and neural activity in response to faces and objects, and to shifts of visual attention. He has held a large number of grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, including 14 GRFs and one Strategic Topics Grant as Co-PI. In addition, for 2026 he was awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship by the HKRGC.

He is a member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Panel of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and was formerly Associate Editor of the British Journal of Psychology and Visual Cognition. His research has been published in leading international journals such as Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Science, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Cerebral Cortex, Nature Neuroscience, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.