Rosie T T Young Professorship in Endocrinology and Metabolism

Professor Xu Aimin received his medical training at Anhui Medical University and obtained his PhD degree in biomedical sciences from the University of Auckland. He joined The University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 2002, and currently serves as a Chair professor in metabolic medicine jointly appointed by Department of Medicine and Department of Pharmacology & Pharmacy, LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU. He also serves as a director for the State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, and a programme director for Institute of Metabolic Medicine (Area of Excellence project funded by Hong Kong Research Council).

Professor Xu’s research primarily focuses on chronic metabolic diseases, including obesity, diabetes, lipid disorders and cardiovascular complications. These chronic metabolic diseases often co-exist and are the major causes of disability and death in our rapidly ageing population. In the past two decades, Professor Xu’s research team has discovered and characterized several important protein biomarkers and hormones secreted from fat and liver with great potentials for risk prediction, precision diagnosis and/or therapeutic interventions of chronic metabolic diseases. A series of immunoassay products developed by his team have been implemented globally for high throughput drug screening and early diagnosis of type 2 diabetes and metabolic dysfunction-associated liver disease (MALSD).  His pioneer work on the liver-secreted peptide hormone (namely FGF21) has contributed substantially to the biopharmaceutical development of FGF21 analogues for treatment of obesity-related metabolic complications (currently under various phases of clinical trials).

Professor Xu has published more than 450 original articles, invited reviews and commentaries in leading academic journals, with more than 48,000 citations and H index of 118. He has been continuously listed as top 1% researchers globally ranked by Claivate Analytics in the past 15 years, with world rank at #4682 by AD Scientific Index and National Ranking at top 35 in medicine (2023). Professor Xu has received a number of highly prestigious awards, including Croucher Foundation Senior Researcher award (2016), National Natural Science award (second class, 2023), National Science & Technology Progress Award (second class,2020), Guangdong Science and Technology Award (1st Class) (2019), China Medical Science and Technology Award (second class, 2019).