Professor CHEN Zhiwei

Director of AIDS Institute, Chair Professor, Department of Microbiology, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong

  • Prof. Zhiwei Chen is the founding director of the AIDS Institute, which was established at The University of Hong Kong Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine in 2007. He is now a tenured chair professor in Department of Microbiology with great interests in AIDS, SARS and COVID-19, vaccine and cancer immunotherapeutic cure research.
  • In 1996, he finished his postgraduate studies with Prof. Preston A. Marx at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center (ADARC) of the Rockefeller University and obtained his Ph.D. degree from New York University School of Medicine in the USA. From 1996 to 2007, he was trained with Prof. David D. Ho and progressed from a post-doc to a research scientist, and then to a staff investigator/assistant professor all at ADARC. In 2007, he joined The University of Hong Kong as an associate professor in Microbiology.
  • Since 1991, he has been engaged in studies of HIV origin, molecular mechanisms of HIV/SIV entry, and AIDS vaccine. After the SARS outbreak in 2003, he studied SARS-CoV vaccine and mechanism underlying vaccine-enhanced acute lung injury. In recent years, he is studying COVID-19 vaccine and immunopathogenesis underlying the acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed SCI papers. He currently serves as an editorial board member for AIDS, JAIDS, JMP and JNIP.