Symposium Speakers

Prof. Andrew M. Chan is a cancer biologist.  He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology from the Institute of Cancer Research at the Royal Marsden Hospital, University of London.  He was a Fogarty International Fellow at the National Cancer Institute of the United States National Institutes of Health, and Faculty Members at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Medical College of Wisconsin.  Professor Chan is currently a member of the Cancer Biology & Experimental Therapeutics Thematic Research Program.  Professor Chan serves on multiple governmental granting agencies and has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers with some in high impact journals such as Science, Nature Genetics, Cancer Cell, PNAS, Blood, and Nature Neuroscience.  The laboratory of Professor Chan focuses on various cancer cell signaling pathways in the initiation and progression of human cancer.  His research involves understanding the regulatory mechanisms of the PTEN tumor suppressor in brain cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Professor Hon Fai Chan is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine and the School of Biomedical Sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He received his Bachelor degree from the University of Hong Kong (2010), before pursuing his Ph.D. degree at Duke University with the support of the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowships for Overseas Studies. During 2015-2017, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining CUHK in 2018. Prof. Chan’s research mainly focuses on advancing biofabrication approach and biomaterial design for stem cell tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, as well as understanding how microenvironmental cues influence stem cell proliferation and differentiation.

Professor Martin Chi Hang Cheung obtained his BSc degree in Biochemistry from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Prof. Cheung completed his postdoctoral training at the National Institute for Medical Research (now part of the Francis Crick Institute), where he demonstrated the functional importance of transcription factor SOX9 in avian neural crest formation, leading to his first academic appointment at the HKU. He is currently an Associate Professor and Associate Director (Research & Innovation) in the School of Biomedical Sciences. Prof. Cheung is one of the leading scientists in the neural crest field and has made seminal contributions to unraveling the molecular mechanisms governing neural crest formation, migration, and lineage differentiation in chick embryos. He has also expanded his research interests to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying the metastasis of neural crest-derived melanoma and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) using patient-specific neuromuscular organoids. To date, he has published many peer-reviewed articles as corresponding author in leading journals, including Development, Developmental Cell, Developmental Biology, PNAS x 2, Nature Communications x 2, Stem Cell Reports, Oncogene, Advanced Science x 3 etc. He also co-published papers with researchers locally and internationally in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications, PNAS, Genome Medicine, etc. His reputation in the field of neural crest and SMA has been recognized by invitations to speak at local, regional, and international conferences. His research findings have been featured in press releases at HKU and extensively covered by the local and overseas media, further highlighting the impact and significance of his scientific contributions.

Ralf Jauch is a Professor at the University of Hong Kong and Associate Director (Knowledge Exchange and Global) at the School of Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Ralf Jauch joined HKUMed in 2018, where he established a multidisciplinary research program at the interface of protein engineering and stem cell biology. He is known for his contributions to improving the quality, utility, and efficiency of stem cell generation through the re-engineering of pioneer transcription factors. His current work focus is on age-linked diseases and rejuvenation, the natural and directed evolution of the molecular toolkit of stem cells, and induced neural stem cells.  He completed his undergraduate studies at the Universities of Jena, Germany, and Manchester, and obtained his Ph.D. at the International Max Planck Research School in Göttingen in Structural Biology. In 2006, he moved to Asia to join the Genome Institute of Singapore, where he developed a passion for stem cells and protein design. In 2013, he joined the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health in Mainland China as Principal Investigator, where he established the GIBH- Max Planck Center for Regenerative Medicine and served as its deputy director. Dr. Jauch works to translate stem technologies at the Centre for Translational Stem Cell Biology  (Health@InnoHK).

Professor Keisuke Kaji is a molecular and cellular biologist, and he has worked to understand molecular mechanisms of cellular reprogramming using iPSC generation as a model over 15 years. His single vector reprogramming system using the piggyBac transposon became one of the first non-viral reprogramming strategies (Nature, 2009). Since then, his group identified cell surface markers to track the reprogramming process (Nature, 2013), and revealed that Smad3 can enhance multiple transcription factor-mediated cell conversions (Cell Stem Cell, 2017). His lab also carried out CRISPR genome-wide knockout screening during reprogramming and identified SINE binding protein ZFP266 as an obstacle against reprogramming factor-mediated chromatin opening (Nature Communications, 2022). Recently, his group has also started working on reprogramming mature hepatocytes into precursors with efficient re-differentiation capacities. This work aims to achieve an unlimited supply of fully functional hepatocytes for toxicology tests, disease modelling and cell therapies

Prof. Stephanie Ma obtained her B.Sc. (Cell Biology and Genetics) and M.Sc. (Experimental Medicine) degrees from the University of British Columbia (Canada), and graduated from The University of Hong Kong (HKU) with a Ph.D. of outstanding ranking that was awarded the Li Ka Shing Prize for the Best PhD Thesis of that year. Since then, she has been working at HKU where she is currently the Jimmy and Emily Tang Professor in Molecular Genetics at the School of Biomedical Sciences in Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, HKU (HKUMed), and Associate Vice-President (Research and Innovation) at HKU. Her research interest is in cancer cell plasticity, and she is particularly keen on exploiting stemness as a cancer cell vulnerability. Her team is dedicated to understand better how a less differentiated and more stemness state in cancer can contribute to therapy resistance and tumor recurrence, with a particular interest in hepatocellular carcinoma. Efforts are directed at conducting basic studies using a combination of molecular, cellular, OMICs, and disease modeling approaches, with an ultimate goal of translating the findings in the lab into better patient care in the clinic.

Professor Steven Pollard is the Professor of Stem Cell and Cancer Biology at the University of Edinburgh. His PhD studies in developmental genetics were performed at the NIMR in Mill Hill, London (now The Francis Crick Institute). As a postdoctoral scientist with Prof Austin Smith FRS at the University of Cambridge his research focussed on gene regulation in mammalian stem cell biology. Latterly, as a Wellcome Beit Fellow, he uncovered the core transcriptional and epigenetic programs that operate in neural stem cells and revealed these are often highjacked by brain cancers, such as glioblastoma.Steve established his own independent laboratory in 2010 at the UCL Cancer Institute (London), before moving in 2013 to the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine and Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre in Edinburgh. He held the prestigious Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Senior Fellowship and, in 2017, was promoted to full Professor.His laboratory continues to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate stem cell identity and differentiation and how these operate in the context of human cancer. He is currently the Director of the CRUK Brain Cancer Centre of Excellence and Associate Director of the CRUK Scotland Centre. He is part of the senior leadership team for the Mammalian UK Synthetic Biology Research Centre, based in Edinburgh. In 2024 this has transitioned into one of the new UK Engineering Biology Hubs.

Steve is Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Trogenix, a biotech uniting cutting-edge technologies in genomics, oncology, immunotherapy, and gene therapy to create a revolutionary therapeutic approach. 

Professor Prakash Ramchandran  is an MRC Senior Clinical Fellow and Honorary Consultant Hepatologist. His research is focused on understanding the role of the innate immune system in fibrosis and fibrosis resolution in the liver and other organs. In particular, cells of the monocyte/macrophage lineage have been shown to be key orchestrators of tissue scarring, and hence represent an attractive therapeutic target. However, macrophages are heterogeneous plastic cells, with multiple subpopulations of varied origin and phenotype. In order to develop effective anti-fibrotic therapies which can modulate macrophage function, it is imperative to fully understand macrophage heterogeneity.

To address this, his lab employs cutting-edge techniques (including single-cell RNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, multiparameter flow cytometry and imaging) to study a range of primary human samples and fibrosis models. They recently defined a novel population of pathogenic macrophages in the fibrotic niche of fibrotic human liver tissue (Nature, 2019) and are now actively working to identify approaches to selectively inhibit the function of these macrophages and reduce tissue scarring.

Professor Brian Bigger is Chair of Advanced Therapeutics at the Institute for Regeneration and Repair, University of Edinburgh. Brian set up his independent research group at the University of Manchester in 2006 to understand the pathology of and develop treatments for neurological lysosomal storage disorders, a group of devastating childhood dementias. Here, the team defined roles for lysosomal storage and neuroinflammation in the pathology of neurological lysosomal diseases and developed several gene and cell therapy treatments for lysosomal diseases, three of which have now progressed to clinical trial. Brian was a co-founder of Orchard Therapeutics and past Chairman of the European Study Group for Lysosomal Diseases.  In 2023, Brian moved to the University of Edinburgh where his research group continues to focus on developing innovative gene and cell therapies for neurological diseases, including childhood dementias, and bringing these treatments to patients.