Dennis Lo
Hong Kong
Hugh de Wardener Lecture
Professor Dennis Lo became the ninth vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2025. He also serves as the Li Ka Shing professor of medicine and professor of chemical pathology at CUHK.
Professor Lo holds a BA from the University of Cambridge and an MD and DPhil degrees from the University of Oxford in London. He began his academic career at Oxford before returning to Hong Kong in 1997, where he made the groundbreaking discovery of fetal DNA in maternal plasma. His pioneering work laid the foundation for non-invasive prenatal testing and advanced the field of liquid biopsy for cancer detection.
Professor Lo is the recipient of numerous international honors, including the 2022 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2021), the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine (2014), and several others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, a founding member and director of the Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
Professor Lo is giving the Hugh de Wardener Lecture in WCN Plenary Session 4 on March 31, 2026, from 12:15pm Japan Time in the Main Hall. He will give the talk, ‘Creating paradigm shifts in medical diagnostics using liquid biopsy.’