Prof. Jonathan Choi Chung-hang from the Department of Electronic Engineering (Biomedical Engineering) received a Croucher Innovation Award 2016 in the amount of HK$ 5 million. He is the first ever recipient from CUHK since the inauguration of this award by the Croucher Foundation in 2012.
Prof. Jonathan Choi Chung-hang specializes in the interactions of nanoparticles with the body across the length scales of organ, tissue, cell, and organelle. His mechanistic research will inform useful ‘design rules’ for building more potent therapeutic nanoparticles. He previously reported novel ‘bio-nano’ interactions between nanoparticles and the kidney (Choi CHJ et al. PNAS, 2011), which will aid the development of new delivery strategies to the kidney. With this award, he hopes to design nanoparticles for detecting kidney diseases in vivo.
Prof. Choi joined CUHK in 2013 as an assistant professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering. As a core member of the Biomedical Engineering Programme, his research interests lie in drug delivery, ‘bio-nano’ interactions, bionanomaterials, and biological imaging.
He remarked, “It is a humbling experience and my deepest honour to be bestowed with this prestigious award. Since biomedical engineering is an interdisciplinary programme, the Croucher Innovation Award will empower me to forge more fruitful research collaborations with the Faculties of Medicine and Science.” He also added, “As a native of Hong Kong, I also hope to inspire more young and talented Hong Kong students to pursue a career in science and engineering.”
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Prof. Choi completed his secondary school studies at Wah Yan College Hong Kong, scoring 10 distinctions in the HKCEE in 2000. He later moved to the U.S. and obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering from Stanford University in 2005 and 2006, respectively. In 2011, he received his Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. For his dissertation, he established important design rules for delivering nanoparticles to the tumor and kidney mesangium in vivo. From 2011 to 2013, he worked as a Croucher postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, where he studied how bionanomaterials enter and subsequently traffic inside the cell.
About The Croucher Innovation Awards
The Croucher Innovation Awards aim to identify a small number of exceptionally talented scientists from all countries working at an internationally competitive level and to offer substantial support to these “rising stars” at a formative stage in their careers. This scheme is designed to enable recipients to pursue their own scientific, intellectual and professional inclinations, to advance their expertise, to engage in bold new work, and to contribute to the development of education and research in Hong Kong. A formal prize presentation ceremony will take place in April 2016.
