CUHK Research: Changing the world

Professor Yan is a leader (Survey Scientist) of the team who completed the largest imaging spectroscopy survey of nearby galaxies. He also led another team to produce the largest library of stellar spectra. His works have proved that warm ionised gas with a temperature of ~10,000K is prevalent in old galaxies and helped understand their origin. Recently, he and his students proposed a new spectral diagnostic method to constrain critical details of how gas in galaxies is ionised by young stars. He also developed a new instrument concept that could significantly improve the efficiency of mapping the universe. My dream is to map the motion and distribution of gas in our MilkyWay Galaxy to understand our galactic home and how stars are born around us. “ Yan Renbin Department of Physics Different individuals have different genomic variations, which make all of us unique. Importantly, some such variations cause genetic diseases. Understanding them is a major challenge given their prevalence and potential threat to quality of life. Riding on high-throughput sequencing, Professor Sung’s team develop computational methods in laboratories that decode human genomes and identify disease-causing variants. For instance, they identified HBV integrations and HPV integrations that cause liver cancer and cervical cancer, respectively. In the future, the team will further improve the accuracy of their methods and integrate their solutions into clinical care to improve disease surveillance, prevention and treatment. We aim to develop cost- effective, time-efficient and accurate methods to identify disease-causing genomic variations of each individual. “ Ken SungWing-kin Department of Chemical Pathology 89 Source: ESA/Hubble & NASA