Professor Kao is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Hong Kong and a member of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at HKU. He earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology from UBC in 1999, under the guidance of Professor Julian Davies, and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School from 1999 to 2001. Professor Kao’s research centers around the application of chemical genetics in infectious diseases, spanning from SARS-CoV, influenza viruses, pathogenic bacteria, to fungi. Recently, he has extended his chemical genetic studies to explore virulence and antimicrobial resistance in bacteria, demonstrating the potential use of non-antibiotic antivirulence compounds for the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus infections, including MRSA. Dr. Kao has published extensively in top microbiology journals, such as mBio, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Nature Biotechnology. He has received numerous awards, including the Innovation Academy Award from the International Consortium of Prevention and Control of Infection (ICPIC) in Geneva, Switzerland in 2017, and most recently, the 2019 State Scientific and Technological Progress Award. Professor Kao is a pioneer in non-antibiotic antivirulence therapeutics for bacterial infections and is the Founder, Director and Chief Scientific Officer of Antenovus Biotechnology Limited.
Richard Yi-Tsun Kao
