RUNDOWN:
17:00 Registration
17:30 Opening Remarks
17:35 Panel Discussion
18:15 Q&A
18:45 Closing Remarks
18:50 End

This program is free of charge; registration is required.

Not all heroes wear capes. Some don lab coats and have helped millions of people through their work. Hang Lung Mathematics Awards and Asia Society Hong Kong Center are pleased to host a panel discussion featuring Professor David Ho, who helped to transform HIV from a fatal infection into a manageable disease, and Professor Dennis Lo, who discovered fetal DNA in maternal blood plasma and revolutionized prenatal testing and cancer screening. These two titans of medical science have taken their groundbreaking discoveries from bench to bedside and beyond. From securing funding to saving countless lives, Professors Ho and Lo, in conversation with Professor Stephanie Ma, Assistant Dean of Innovation and Technology Transfer in the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at The University of Hong Kong, will take us on an insightful journey through the worlds of virology, genetics, and biotech entrepreneurship. 

In collaboration with Asia Society Hong Kong Center, this event forms part of the Hang Lung Mathematics Awards Public Talk series under the theme “Shaping our Future”. It aims to underscore the significance and importance of basic sciences in our rapidly evolving world.

For more information about Hang Lung Mathematics Awards, please visit https://hlma.hanglung.com/en.

Professor David Ho is the Scientific Director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine, as well as Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, at Columbia University Medical Center. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology (1974) and Harvard Medical School (1978).

Prof. Ho has been at the forefront of AIDS research for 40 years. His elegant studies unraveled the dynamic nature of HIV replication and revolutionized our basic understanding of this horrific disease.  This knowledge led him to champion combination antiretroviral therapy that resulted in unprecedented control of HIV in patients beginning in 1996. An automatic death sentence has been transformed into a manageable disease, and over 25 million worldwide are currently on such life-saving therapy. Prof. Ho’s research team has devoted considerable efforts in the past four years to address the COVID-19 pandemic by characterizing antibody responses to infection or vaccination, as well as mapping out the rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

Prof.  Ho has published ~500 scientific papers and received fifteen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide, including Columbia, Tufts, Swarthmore, Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, Tsinghua, and HKU. He was named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year (1996) and the recipient of a Presidential Medal from Bill Clinton (2001). He was recognized by the Kingdom of Thailand with the Prince Mahidol Award in Medicine (2014) and given the Distinguished Alumni Award by Caltech (2015).  He was also inducted into the California Hall of Fame (2006).  Prof. Ho serves as a member of the Trustees of Caltech and was a board member of the MIT Corporation and Harvard Board of Overseers. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (1997) as well as the Chinese Academy of Engineering (2004).

Professor Dennis Lo is the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and the President of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences. His research interests focus on the biology and diagnostic applications of cell-free nucleic acids in plasma. In particular, he discovered the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma in 1997 and has since then been pioneering non-invasive prenatal diagnosis using this technology. This technology has been adopted globally and has created a paradigm in prenatal medicine. He has also made many innovations using circulating nucleic acids for cancer detection, including the screening of early-stage nasopharyngeal cancer.

In recognition of his research, Prof. Lo has been elected as Fellow of the Royal Society, Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and Founding Member of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences. Prof. Lo has won numerous awards, including the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2022 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.

Professor Stephanie Ma is a Professor and the Assistant Dean of Innovation and Technology Transfer in the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at The University of Hong Kong. She holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Hong Kong. Prof. Ma has over 20 years of experience in scientific research and teaching in academia, with interest in how a more stemness and less differentiated state in cancer can contribute to therapy resistance and tumor recurrence. Her scientific excellence has been recognized by numerous awards including the 2014 Croucher Innovation Award, the 2014 Scientific Research Outstanding Achievement Awards (Second-class Award in Science and Technology Section) from the Higher Education Institution of China, the 2017 University of British Columbia Alumni Builder Award (Canada), the 2021 Research Grants Council (RGC) Research Fellow Scheme as well as the 2023 Croucher Senior Research Fellowship. Prof. Ma is also a Founding Member of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences, where she currently serves as Vice-President and Co-Chair of their Outreach Committee. She is a Principal Investigator at the State Key Laboratory of Liver Research, Associate Director of the Knowledge Exchange Office at The University of Hong Kong and have been serving as a member of the Board of Director at Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks since 2020.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and participants and, unless expressly stated to the contrary, do not reflect the opinion, position or official policy of Asia Society Hong Kong, its members, or its committees. Asia Society Hong Kong does not endorse or approve and assumes no responsibility for the content of the information presented.