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Dr. ZHANG, Eric Lu receives President's Award for Outstanding Performance (Early Career Researcher)
16 May 2023
Dr. Zhang Lu, a Principal Investigator of the Institute of System Medicine and Health Science (SMHS), has been recognized for his outstanding performance as an early career researcher. Dr. Zhang joined the Department of Computer Science in 2019 with a solid background in computational biology and bioinformatics. Since then, he has further developed his interdisciplinary research in human genomics and gut microbiome by exploring novel computational methods and tools to analyse large and complex data sets. With an impressive portfolio of papers and research grants under his name, as well as his active engagement in knowledge transfer projects, Dr. Zhang has demonstrated a promising potential at this early stage of his academic career.
As a core member of the SMHS and Computational Medicine Lab, Dr. Zhang has forged close cooperative ties with colleagues from the Faculty of Science and the School of Chinese Medicine, and made significant contributions to HKBU bioinformatics research. Dr. Zhang’s competence has been reflected by the publication of more than 40 of his papers in top-tier international journals, including three articles in National Communications, five in Briefings in Bioinformatics, and one in Microbiome. These journals have respective impact factors of 17.69, 13.99 and 16.86. Furthermore, 63.4% of his papers were published in the top 10% journals, according to CiteScore. The superb quality of his scholarly work is reflected by Google Scholar, which registered 2,703 citations and an H-Index of 17.
Over the past three years, Dr. Zhang has made successfully bids for seven external research grants as Principal Investigator (PI), including one under the University Grants Council (UGC) Early Career Scheme (ECS) of $650,000, one from the Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) at $1.8 million, two grants from industry at $1 million, and three Guangdong and Shenzhen research grants of $460,000. In partnership with the School of Chinese Medicine, he has submitted funding proposals to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)/RGC Joint and Collaborative Research Scheme, the Health Bureau’s Health and Medical Research Fund (HMRF) and other organisations for the establishment of an interdisciplinary research centre for artificial intelligence (AI)-based drug discovery.
Besides his track record in academic research, Dr. Zhang has keenly connected with industry through knowledge transfer projects. Notably, he has played a key role in helping an elderly care community to enhance its records by improving the algorithms in the health management systems. His algorithms will also feature in the official toolkit of a precision medicine company’s sequencing products. These knowledge transfers will potentially develop into impact cases for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2024.
Dr. Zhang has extended his professional services to advance the field of bioinformatics and also to promote HKBU. In addition to serving as a guest editor for five international journals and as an organiser of international workshops on bioinformatics, he has been invited to give talks at international conferences as well as the AI in Healthcare Webinar series jointly hosted by HKBU and the Hospital Authority (HA).
Dr. Zhang's outstanding performance as an early career researcher is a testament to his dedication and hard work in advancing interdisciplinary research in the field of system medicine and health science. His contributions to the Institute of System Medicine and Health Science will undoubtedly continue to drive innovation and progress in this important area of research. Congratulations again to Dr. Zhang on his incredible success in receiving the President's Award for Outstanding Performance (Early Career Researcher).