Tenured Chair Professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy in the Department of Microbiology, School of Clinical Medicine, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at HKU
University of Hong Kong (HKU)
Hong Kong, China
Zhiwei Chen is a Tenured Chair Professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy in the Department of Microbiology, School of Clinical Medicine, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He was conferred the Suen Chi-Sun Professorship in Clinical Science in 2024.
He received his PhD from the New York University School of Medicine in 1996 and, by 2002, had progressed from an NIH F32 Postdoctoral Fellow to Assistant Professor at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center of The Rockefeller University. In 2007, he joined HKU as an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the HKUMed AIDS Institute. He is a former Chairman of the Hong Kong Society for Immunology and an Executive Committee Member of the China AIDS Vaccine Initiative. He also served as a Member of the Hong Kong Advisory Council on AIDS for the HKSAR Department of Health from 2008 to 2014.
His research focuses on AIDS, SARS and COVID-19 pathogenesis and immunotherapy, with an emphasis on the early events of viral infection. He pioneered the creation of HKU-patented platforms of technologies, including the PD1-based vaccine, the tandem anti-HIV-1 bi-specific antibody, and an anti-Δ42PD1 antibody drug for viral infection and cancer. Clarivate Analytics has ranked him among the top 1% of researchers worldwide by citations and a Highly Cited Researcher in 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has won numerous research grants as PI from, for example, NIH RO1, amfAR and the Gates Foundation among others. He also won the HKU Knowledge Exchange Excellence Award (2019), Outstanding Researcher Award (2021), Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award (2021) and Faculty Outstanding Research Output Award (2023).