Events
Yen Kwo Yung Lecture in Life Sciences- (1st Online Lecture) “My Journey from a Student to a Clinician-Scientist” by Prof. Dennis Lo
26 Mar 2022
2:30 pm – 4:00 pm
Online (Zoom)
Professor Dennis Lo YM
Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Professor Dennis Lo’s research interests focus on the biology and diagnostic applications of cell-free nucleic acids in plasma. In particular, he discovered the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma in 1997 and has since then been pioneering non-invasive prenatal diagnosis using this technology. This technology has been adopted globally and has created a paradigm in prenatal medicine. He has also made many innovations using circulating nucleic acids for cancer detection, including the screening of early stage nasopharyngeal cancer.
In recognition of his research, Professor Lo has been elected as Fellow of the Royal Society, Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and Founding Member of the Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong. Professor Lo has won numerous awards, including the 2016 Future Science Prize in Life Science, the 2014 King Faisal International Prize in Medicine, the 2019 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award, The 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2021 Royal Medal.
Professor Lo has developed “non-invasive prenatal testing” to early diagnose genetic disease in foetus, which is to the benefit of numerous pregnant women. In the lecture, Professor Lo will walk us through his journey beginning as a secondary school student from St. Joseph’s College, Hong Kong, to becoming a medical student in the University Cambridge, and then at the University of Oxford. He will also share how the help from mentors and chance occurrences along the way would alter the course of his study and research. Building on his experiences, step-by-step, speaker has eventually realised his goal of developing “non-invasive prenatal testing”. It is hoped that this lecture will inspire our students to consider scientific research as one of their career choices.
Language: Cantonese
