Two distinguished scientists at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), Professor Jia Wei, Cheung On Tak Endowed Professor in Chinese Medicine and Associate Dean (International Collaboration) of the School of Chinese Medicine, and Professor Cai Zongwei, Kwok Yat Wai Endowed Chair in Environmental and Biological Analysis and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Environmental and Biological Analysis, have been elected as a Member and a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea respectively this year.
This prestigious recognition underscores Professor Jia’s exceptional contributions to the field of metabolism and physiology, and Professor Cai’s remarkable achievements in environmental and analytical chemistry.
Established in 1988, the Academia Europaea is the pan-European Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Letters. It is committed to advancing and disseminating excellence in scholarship across a wide range of disciplines, including the humanities, law, economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of the natural and technological sciences. It comprises around 5,000 distinguished scientists and scholars, including 83 Nobel Prize laureates.
Professor Jia is a renowned scientist in metabolomics and has a distinguished career in the pharmaceutical and medical field. Since joining HKBU in 2019, Professor Jia’s research has primarily focused on the identification of biomarkers in various metabolic diseases and investigating the mechanisms of key metabolic pathways involved in disease pathogenesis.
Currently, Professor Jia serves as the Director of the Hong Kong Traditional Chinese Medicine Phenome Research Centre, the first phenome centre focusing on Chinese medicine in both local and global contexts. Under his leadership, the Centre has attracted top global talents to conduct high-quality molecular and population-level translational research.
Professor Jia’s exceptional impact is demonstrated by a Google Scholar citation count of over 35,000 and a Google H-Index of 88. He was selected as one of the Most Cited Chinese Researchers in 2020, 2021, and 2022 by ELSEVIER, a leading global academic publisher. He has published 10 books, secured over 20 patents, and produced more than 500 papers in high-impact academic journals. Many of the papers published during his tenure at HKBU’s School of Chinese Medicine have ranked among the top 1% of most-cited journals in the field of biomedical sciences.
Professor Cai is a distinguished chemist in the field of environmental and analytical chemistry and an internationally acclaimed expert in environmental toxicology and human health research.
Professor Cai established and directed the Dioxin Analysis Laboratory since 2003 and the State Key Laboratory of Environmental and Biological Analysis since 2013, which have significant impact on environmental sciences and human health research in Hong Kong, the Great Bay Area and Mainland China. He was invited as the principal author for the Asia-Pacific regional reports on persistent organic pollutants under the Stockholm Convention by the United Nation Environmental Program.
Professor Cai has an outstanding research record with more than 700 scientific publications, 21,000 citations and a Scopus H-index of 73. He has been consecutively listed as the world’s most highly cited researcher in Stanford University’s list of World’s Top 2% Scientists in Analytical and Environmental Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and won the 2011 Second-Class State Natural Science Award for a collaborative research project. In 2018, he won the Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award (Science and Technology) in Natural Sciences by the National Ministry of Education and the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Eliminate Persistent Organic Pollutants by the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences. He also received the Distinguished Young Scholar Award in 2003 by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and was appointed as “Changjiang Scholar – Chair Professor” by the National Ministry of Education in 2013.