New leadership
CUHK is delighted to announce the appointments of Prof. Dennis Lo as the ninth Vice-Chancellor and President for a period of five years from 8 January 2025, and Prof. Chao Xi as Dean of the Faculty of Law and Prof. Anthony Fung as Dean of the Faculty of Scoial Science for a term of five years from November 2024.
Prof. Dennis Lo to take CUHK to new heights
Prof. Dennis Lo is globally renowned as a pioneer, innovator, and leader in liquid biopsy, and is known as the ‘father of non-invasive prenatal testing’. He is the Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Chemical Pathology of CUHK. He is also the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Medicine. Prof. Lo received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge. He then moved to the University of Oxford where he pursued his clinical medical training. Following qualification, he further obtained his Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Medicine degrees from Oxford.
Prof. Lo joined CUHK in 1997. In the same year, he reported the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma, laying the important foundation for non-invasive DNA-based prenatal testing. He and his colleagues have been instrumental in making non-invasive DNA-based prenatal testing a clinical reality. The non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) they developed for Down syndrome is regarded as a significant breakthrough by the global scientific community, and has been widely adopted in over 100 countries. Every year approximately 10 million pregnant women worldwide benefit from NIPT. Furthermore, Prof. Lo has developed genome-wide genetic and epigenetic approaches that facilitate the early detection of multiple types of cancer, propelling cancer liquid biopsy into the era of genome-wide analysis. He and his team have successfully developed technologies that allow for their detection and clinical applications.
In recognition of his work, Prof. Lo has received numerous international honours and awards. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013. He received the 2014 King Faisal International Prize for Medicine and became the first Chinese scientist to be honoured with the American Association of Clinical Chemistry Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award in 2015. In 2016, Prof. Lo was selected as the winner of the inaugural Future Science Prize in Life Science, which is regarded as China’s Nobel Prize. In the same year, he was named the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Chemistry, an honour considered as a predictive index of the Nobel Prize. He was also the first Chinese recipient of the Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award in 2019. In 2021, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, widely known as the ‘Oscars of Science’, and became the first Chinese scientist to receive the Royal Medal in biological sciences from the Royal Society of London. In 2022, Prof. Lo was awarded the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, widely regarded as the US’s top biomedical research prize. In 2023, he was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and received the inaugural Tengchong Science Award. This year, he became the first Chinese scholar to receive the prestigious Jiménez Díaz Lecture Award.
Of his upcoming role, Prof. Lo has this to say, ‘A good Vice-Chancellor must be fully committed to making the university among the top institutions in the world. I hope to elevate CUHK to the next level, boosting its global reputation, and most importantly, generating research and innovations that can truly change the world.’
Prof. Chao Xi as Dean of Law
Prof. Chao Xi joined CUHK in 2007 after earning his PhD from the University of London. He has held several leadership positions within the Faculty of Law at CUHK, including Interim Dean, Associate Dean (Research), and Head of the Graduate Division of Law. Prof. Xi is internationally recognised for his research and scholarship in Chinese law, corporate law and governance, securities regulation, financial regulation, and empirical legal studies. He has secured numerous competitive research grants, including several prestigious fundings from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.
Prof. Anthony Fung as Dean of Social Science
Prof. Anthony Fung joined CUHK in 2001 after earning his PhD from the University of Minnesota. He currently holds a professorship in the School of Journalism and Communication of the Faculty of Social Science at CUHK and is the Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies. His research spans creative media, digital platforms, popular culture and cultural studies. Prof. Fung is a well-known scholar in China and across the globe. He has held prestigious positions such as the Buffett Visiting Professor at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs of Northwestern University, and Pearl River Scholar Chair Professor at Jinan University. His interdisciplinary research has secured numerous competitive grants, including the Key Grant of the National Social Science Foundation of China.
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