Dr. Chan’s research focuses on the development of biomaterials and imaging approaches to facilitate the clinical translation of cancer therapy and cell therapy, and early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.

She received her BSc and PhD degrees from The University of Hong Kong. She completed post-doctoral fellowships in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at Department of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and became an Assistant Professor in 2014. She joined City University of Hong Kong in 2016.

She is a leading researcher in applying a frontier molecular MRI contrast mechanism, known as chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST), to address clinical needs. She has pioneered the imaging of glucose utilization in the brain using CEST-MRI. The way how our brain uses glucose has many implications on diagnosis and monitoring therapy in many neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. Her team is developing various techniques to effectively image and deliver drugs/cells to the brain non-invasively. She published over 60 peer-reviewed articles, including a cover article in Nature Materials, Science Advances and Nature Communications. Her works are well recognised by the MRI community, e.g. she has been invited to give education talks 5 years in a row at the annual conference of International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM – a premium conference in MRI with over 10,000 attendees, including scientists, engineers, clinicians and medical physicists). She was the committee of annual meeting program committee (AMPC), and now the publication committee of ISMRM. Most AMPC members are full professors at top research universitites worldwide (http://www.ismrm.org/20m/ampc/). Dr. Chan is one of the four members from Greater China Region. Recently, she was invited to give a webinar in the CEST imaging expert series organised by Bruker.