[8] While the societal challenges in Hong Kong were escalating to an unprecedented level in July 2019, he called for the underlying root cause of the society's reaction to the extradition bill to be identified and addressed.
[9][10] On 8 November 2019, during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, Shyy was presiding over a graduation ceremony when he was notified of the death of Chow Tsz-lok, a HKUST student.
[12] In the context of sustainability and global warming, he was an early advocate to treat university as a living laboratory, to experiment, assess and test lab-based invention and solutions.
[13] A key cornerstone for making such efforts successful is to develop system-wide, versus locally customized, cross-disciplinary pursuits.
[14] Shyy has made substantial contributions to air and space flight vehicle research and development, fluid machinery design optimization, and computational methods for complex unsteady flows.
His work in flapping wing aerodynamics, surrogate-based optimization for space propulsion components and battery technologies, computational modeling for gas turbine combustor flows, cavitating and multiphase dynamics, power generation devices, biomechanical systems, and high performance materials processing are internationally recognized.
[25] He is the author or a co-author of five books and numerous journal and conference articles dealing with computational and modeling techniques involving fluid flow, biological and low Reynolds number aerodynamics, combustion and propulsion, and a broad range of topics related to aerial and space flight vehicles.