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Science Public Lecture: We are All Getting Fatter – Causes, Challenges and Solutions

Science Public Lecture: We are All Getting Fatter – Causes, Challenges and Solutions
Date & Time
February 1, 2024 (Thursday) | 5:30 pm (HKT)
Venue
CYPP4, LG1/F, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building, Main Campus, HKU ( Map )
Speaker
Professor Chi Bun CHAN
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at The University of Hong Kong; Vice President of The Hong Kong Society of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Reproduction

Science Public Lecture: We are All Getting Fatter – Causes, Challenges and Solutions

 
Obesity is a widespread metabolic disorder with increasing prevalence around the world. In Hong Kong, the incidence of obese adults in our population has surged from 21% in 2003 to 33% in 2022. Given the strong correlation between obesity and numerous diseases like stroke, heart attacks, diabetes, and even cancer, the increasing number of obese people could significantly strain our healthcare and economic system. From a biological perspective, obesity is caused by the imbalance between food intake and energy expenditure. Subsequently, the nutrient and energy metabolism in different tissues of the body are dysregulated, leading to abnormal intracellular signaling and functional impairments. Different pharmacological interventions or  lifestyle modifications have been developed to rescue the imbalanced metabolism in obese people in the past decades, but these methods are also accompanied by undesirable side effects. Hence, developing effective methods to control the body weight of obese people is still a hot research area nowadays. This lecture will discuss various causes of obesity, its detrimental impact on human health, and the latest research on preventive or therapeutic methods to combat obesity.
 

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Professor Chi Bun CHAN

Speaker Professor Chi Bun CHAN

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at The University of Hong Kong; Vice President of The Hong Kong Society of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Reproduction

Professor Chi Bun Chan is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at The University of Hong Kong, the Vice President of The Hong Kong Society of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Reproduction, and the co-founder of the biotech company InnoDetection Limited. Before joining HKU, Professor Chan served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Centre and Emory University in the USA. Recently, he was selected by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China as a recipient of the National High-end Foreign Experts Recruitment Plan. Professor Chan is interested in identifying novel signaling pathways that regulate energy metabolism in exercise, aging, obesity, diabetes and the development of novel therapeutic drugs for metabolic diseases. Using interdisciplinary approaches, Professor Chan’s team has found many new mechanisms that cause obesity and diabetes, which have been reported by top-tier scientific journals and many public media. In addition to getting funding from HK agencies, including RGC, HMRF, and HKSTP, his research work is also supported by NIH, PHF, OCAST, and Harold Hamm Diabetes Center in the USA.

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