Gallant Ho Outstanding Young Professorship

The Department of Microbiology at the School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has been at the forefront of research into emerging viruses since it was established in 1968. Today the Department is actively involved in research, teaching, and clinical service in the fields of microbiology and infectious diseases.

The vision of the Department is to be the best clinical service laboratory and research center of emerging infectious diseases on a global scale. Its major research areas are on respiratory pathogens including the influenza virus and emerging coronaviruses.

Professor Chu Hin is an Associate Professor at the Department, and the Gallant Ho Outstanding Young Professor. His key work investigates the pathogenic mechanisms, host and viral determinants of emerging viral pathogens, with an emphasis on highly pathogenic coronaviruses. He and his research team apply cutting-edge molecular virology techniques to study the most critical questions on emerging viruses and have made a number of significant breakthroughs.

As part of his work, Professor Chu is investigating the mechanisms that allow SARS-CoV-2 to spread more efficiently than SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, as well as how highly pathogenic coronaviruses cause severe diseases in humans.

Professor Chu’s research in emerging viruses has led to the opening up of new research fields and has changed practice and policy both locally and internationally. He systematically revealed key host factors for coronavirus invasion and replication, which explained why coronaviruses have emerged as highly successful human pathogens, and he was the first to establish and mechanistically illustrate the relationship between apoptosis and coronavirus pathogenesis. Professor Chu was also the first to reveal that coronaviruses can infect immune cells, which in part contributes to their pathogenicity.

In 2022, he was the first to demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 Omicron is significantly less pathogenic than ancestral SARS-CoV-2 and all previous SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern due to less efficient spike cleavage and TMPRSS2 usage. This finding resulted in an adjustment in COVID-19 public health measures both locally and internationally.

He obtained his Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2005, and then his PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Emory University in 2012. Receiving a Post-doctoral Fellowship at HKU’s Department of Microbiology in 2013, he joined as a Research Assistant Professor in 2016 and was later appointed as an Assistant Professor in 2021.

Professor Chu has won numerous honours and awards, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China Excellent Young Scientists Fund, HKU Outstanding Young Researcher Award, HKU Research Output Prize, and the inaugural Outstanding Young Professorship at HKUMed, the Gallant Ho Outstanding Young Professor. With more than 35,000 citations and 170 SCI-indexed journal publications, his output has been highly prolific. He is consistently recognised as a “Highly Cited Researcher” and ranked as a top 1% scholar by the Clarivate Analytics’ Essential Science Indicators. He has consistently published original research articles in respected journals including Nature, The Lancet, Cell Research, Cell Host & Microbe, Nature Microbiology, Nature Methods, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and Lancet Microbe.