Dr. Chen Yu Wai
- Senior Research Fellow, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Dr. Chen studied Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Imperial College London. He worked for a PhD at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, Cambridge, UK under the supervision of Kim Henrick and Sir Alan Fersht, and completed in 1994. He did postdoc with Gary Brayer (University of British Columbia); and subsequently John Collier (Harvard Medical School) from 1994 to 1997. Next, he moved back to Cambridge, UK and joined the late Max Perutz as a research associate until 2003; then with David Glover (Cambridge). He was a visiting professor of the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005. From 2005 to 2015, he was a lecturer at the Randall Division of King’s College London. Since 2016, he joined the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a research staff.
Dr. Chen aspires to advance the molecular understanding of pathogens and diseases, in particular, polyglutamine expansion diseases. He is generally interested in the structural biology of proteins that have implications in human diseases: including bacterial and viral virulent factors, proteins implicated in cell cycle control, cytoskeletal components, etc.