Personal information
Biography
Hongzhe Sun obtained his Ph.D from the University of London in 1996 (Birkbeck College). After postdoctoral work at the University of Edinburgh, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong in 1998 where he is currently a Chair Professor of Chemistry, Norman & Cecilia Yip Professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry, and honorary professor of Pharmacology and Pharmacy as well as Biochemistry. He is the president-elect of the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC).
His research interests lie in inorganic chemical biology, metalloproteomics/ metalloproteomics and metals in medicine. He is the recipient of the NSFC Outstanding Young Scholar Award (2005), Croucher Senior Research Fellow (2010), WuXi AppTech Life Science & Chemistry Research Award (2016), UC Berkeley Earl L Muetterties Memorial Lectureship (2018), RGC senior research fellow (2021), AsBIC Outstanding Achievement Award (2022) and RSC Horizon Prize (2023). He is a series editor of Metallobiology (RSC) and editor of J. Biol. Inorg. Chem (Springer), and serves on the editorial board of Metallomics, J. Inorg. Chem. and BioMetals.
Prof. Sun's research interests are centered at chemical biology of metals (e.g. medicinal chemistry of main group elements and new approaches to overcome antimicrobial resistance (AMR)) and antivirus (SARS-CoV-1/2). He has published over 240 papers in international journals including Nat Commun, Nat Mach Intell, Nat Microbiol, PNAS (bio)chemical journals (e.g. Angew. Chem., JACS, JBC), and edited a book entitled “Biological chemistry of arsenic, antimony and bismuth” (Wiley & Sons, 2011).