Yuen Kwok-yung (traditional Chinese: 袁國勇), Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (Basic Medicine and Health) and Gold Bauhinia Star Awardee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, was born in Hong Kong and graduated from the Medical School at the University of Hong Kong. He is also Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Lond, Edin), Surgeons(Glas) and Pathologists(UK). After years of clinical and laboratory training, he established the infectious disease service and rapid molecular diagnosis for cytomegalovirus and tuberculosis at the Queen Mary Hospital, the teaching hospital of the University of Hong Kong.

In the outbreak of avian influenza virus H5N1 in 1997 in Hong Kong, Professor KY Yuen was the first to report in Lancet about the unusual clinical severity and high mortality of infected patients which could be identified by the in-house designed molecular test at his laboratory[1]. During the outbreak of SARS in 2003, he led his team in the discovery of the SARS coronavirus and was honoured as Asian heroes of the year in April by Time Asia Magazine[2,3,4]. Subsequently he found the natural reservoir of SARS coronavirus like virus in Chinese horseshoe bat and renewed the interest of bats as the source of novel microbes causing emerging infectious diseases[5]. His success in finding novel microbes in human and animals is exemplified by the discovery of human coroanvirus HKU1[6], bat coronavirus HKU2 to 13[7,8,9], bovine and porcine hokovirus[10] and Laribacter hongkongensis in fish and human[11,12].

Yuen Kwok-yung, is currently the Chair of Infectious Diseases of the Department of Microbiology of the University of Hong Kong. He is also the co-director of the state key laboratory of emerging infectious disease of China in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the founding co-director of the Hong Kong University-Pasteur Research Centre. His 900 publications with over 28,000 citations are mainly related to the research of novel microbes or emerging infectious disease agents.