CUHK professor receives honorary fellowship from Monash University

Prof. Juliana Chan (right) receives an honorary fellowship from Mr. Simon McKeon (left), Chancellor of Monash.

In October 2018, Prof. Juliana Chan, Chair Professor of Medicine and Therapeutics and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Diabetes and Obesity received an honorary fellowship from Monash University (Monash), Australia in recognition of her distinguished scientific achievement for the benefit of the community.

Led by Prof. Chan, the two diabetes research teams at CUHK and Monash have been collaborating at the frontier of the disease for decades. Both teams have joined hands to publish extensively on the growing concerns of young onset diabetes and diabetic kidney disease over the years, and to remind the scientific and lay communities of the risk factors of coronary heart disease, especially in Asia. While the CUHK team uses multiple cohort data from the Hong Kong Diabetes Register and the Joint Asia Diabetes Evaluation (JADE) Program to discover biogenetic markers and advocates personalised care through new technologies, the Monash team complements the effort with state-of-the-art methodologies to develop mechanisms that can alter gene expression related to diabetic complications.

Jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Health and Medical Research Council of the Australian Government, the two teams discovered the genetic regulation of cardiovascular disease in Type 2 diabetes of the Chinese population, and will continue to contribute through knowledge discovery, application and transfer to realise the shared vision of preventing and controlling diabetes using innovation and holistic care.