Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming

Biography

Professor Dennis Lo assumed office as the ninth Vice-Chancellor and President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) on 8 January 2025. Professor Lo is globally renowned as a pioneer, innovator, and leader in liquid biopsy, and is known as the "father of non-invasive prenatal testing". He is also the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine, and the Professor of Chemical pathology of CUHK. Professor Lo received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge. He then moved to the University of Oxford where he pursued his clinical medical training. Following qualification, he further obtained his Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Medicine degrees from Oxford.

Professor Lo joined CUHK in 1997. In the same year, he reported the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma, laying the important foundation for non-invasive DNA-based prenatal testing. He and his colleagues have been instrumental in making non-invasive DNA-based prenatal testing a clinical reality. The non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) they developed for Down syndrome is regarded as a significant breakthrough by the global scientific community, and has been widely adopted in over 100 countries. Every year approximately 10 million pregnant women worldwide benefit from NIPT. Furthermore, Professor Lo has developed genome-wide genetic and epigenetic approaches that facilitate the early detection of multiple types of cancer, propelling cancer liquid biopsy into the era of genome-wide analysis. He and his team have successfully developed technologies that allow for their detection and clinical applications.

In recognition of his work, Professor Lo has received numerous international honours and awards. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013. He received the 2014 King Faisal International Prize for Medicine and became the first Chinese scientist to be honoured with the American Association of Clinical Chemistry (AACC) Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award in 2015. In 2016, Professor Lo was selected as the winner of the inaugural Future Science Prize in Life Science, which is regarded as China’s Nobel Prize. In the same year, he was named the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Chemistry, an honour considered as a predictive index of the Nobel Prize. He was also the first Chinese recipient of the Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award in 2019. In 2021, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, widely known as the “Oscars of Science”, and became the first Chinese scientist to receive the Royal Medal in biological sciences from the Royal Society of London. In 2022, Professor Lo was awarded the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, widely regarded as the US’s top biomedical research prize. In 2023, he was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and received the inaugural Tengchong Science Award. In 2024, he became the first Chinese scholar to receive the prestigious Jiménez Díaz Lecture Award.