Keynote Speakers Details

Prof. Hon-Cheong So received his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree together with a PhD degree in 2012 from The University of Hong Kong (HKU). He joined the School of Biomedical Sciences of The Chinese University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in Jan 2016 and is also currently assistant professor (by courtesy) of the Department of Psychiatry, CUHK. His main research interests include the development and application of novel statistical and computational methodologies to “omics” and clinical data in general.  In particular, he is interested in uncovering the genetic architecture of complex diseases and predicting disease risk and phenotypes based on bioinformatics and clinical data. His work has been published in major journals in the field, including first or corresponding papers in Nature Neuroscience, American Journal of Human Genetics, Plos genetics, Psychological Medicine, Bioinformatics etc.

He has developed methodologies for evaluating the heritability explained by individual genetic variants and the entire set of markers on a genome-wide association study (GWAS) panel.  He has also developed novel methods to combine genetic information with family history in improving risk prediction, as well as new ways to construct polygenic risk scores. He is one of the lead-authors in a schizophrenia GWAS in Chinese population, leading to discovery of a novel susceptibility loci on the X chromosome. He has received numerous awards for his academic achievement, including the Croucher Foundation Scholarship and the Dr. Stephen K.P. Chang Gold Medal for the best PhD thesis in the Faculty of Medicine, HKU. And he was recently awarded the Young Researcher Award 2018 by CUHK for outstanding research achievements.