Professor Yuen Kwok Yung is the Chair in the Department of Microbiology and Henry Fok Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong, and the co-director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases since 2005. He is a physician and microbiologist, and holds an MBBS and MD from the University of Hong Kong.
Professor Yuen has discovered over 100 novel species of virus, bacteria, fungi and parasites from patients and animals. Several of these novel animal viruses or their close relatives cause emerging infectious diseases by jumping from animals to human. In 2003, he led his team in the discovery of human SARS coronavirus, and the bat SARS related coronavirus. Professor Yuen has published extensively in the areas of coronaviruses, influenza and other emerging virus infections, and was named by Clarivate, in its list of Highly Cited Researchers, among the top 1% of scholars worldwide, for three consecutive years from 2020 to 2022.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, Professor Yuen was the first in the world to provide evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be easily transmitted from person-to-person in a family cluster presenting to the hospital, and that patients could be re-infected with the virus. His discoveries and expertise have been referenced by governments and healthcare policy makers internationally as they responded to the spread of the global pandemic.
Professor Yuen is a qualified specialist in clinical microbiology, internal medicine and surgery in the Hong Kong SAR and the United Kingdom. He is also academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (Basic Medicine) and the American Academy of Microbiology. He was awarded the Future Science Prize in 2021. The HKSAR government has awarded him a Silver and Gold Bauhinia Star for his work on microbial hunting and emerging infections.