Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming became the ninth Vice-Chancellor and President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong on 8 January 2025, and is the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Chemical Pathology. CUHK's biography records that he took his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Cambridge, pursued clinical medical training at the University of Oxford, and obtained his PhD and Doctor of Medicine there. He joined CUHK in 1997 and that year reported the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma, laying the foundation for non-invasive prenatal testing. With colleagues he turned NIPT into clinical reality, including a test for Down syndrome that the university describes as a major breakthrough; it is now used in more than 100 countries and by over 100 million pregnant women. He later developed genome-wide genetic and epigenetic approaches for the early detection of multiple cancers, moving cancer liquid biopsy into genome-wide analysis and into clinical application. His honours include election as a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Silver Bauhinia Star in 2011; international membership of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013; the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine in 2014; the AACC Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award in 2015, the first Chinese scientist so honoured; the inaugural Future Science Prize in Life Science and the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate award in 2016; appointment as a Justice of the Peace in 2017; the Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award in 2019, as the first Chinese recipient; the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Royal Society's Royal Medal in biological sciences in 2021, the first Chinese scientist to receive the latter; the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 2022; membership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the inaugural Tengchong Science Award in 2023; the Jiménez Díaz Lecture Award in 2024; the Richard B. Johnston, Jr. Prize in Developmental Biology and foreign membership of Academia Europaea in 2025; and, in 2026, the AACR-Irving Weinstein Foundation Distinguished Lectureship, an honorary Doctor of Medical Science from Cambridge and the Gold Bauhinia Star.
Achievements
- 1997 · Reported cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma
- 2021 · Received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
- 2025 · Became the ninth Vice-Chancellor and President of CUHK