Professor Dennis Lo assumed office as the ninth Vice-Chancellor and President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) on 8 January 2025. Prof. Lo is concurrently the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Chemical Pathology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Prof. Lo returned to Hong Kong in 1997. In the same year, he discovered the presence of fetal DNA in maternal plasma. His group has since remained at the forefront of this field. His group was the first to report the presence of cell-free fetal RNA and fetal epigenetic markers in maternal plasma and pioneered the use of such markers for noninvasive prenatal diagnosis. Prof. Lo and his colleagues were also the first to show that cell-free fetal nucleic acids in maternal plasma could be used for the noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of fetal trisomy 21 and had devised multiple solutions for this hitherto difficult diagnostic problem, including methods based on plasma RNA-SNP allelic ratios, plasma epigenetic markers, digital PCR and massively parallel DNA sequencing. With the use of massively parallel sequencing and the development of novel bioinformatics strategies, Prof. Lo's group succeeded at deciphering a genome-wide genetic map of the fetus through the analysis of the small amounts of fragmented DNA floating in the blood of pregnant women. This scientific achievement lays the foundation for developing non-invasive prenatal diagnostic tests for multiple genetic diseases in a non-invasive way.
In the area of cancer detection, Prof. Lo has pioneered a number of approaches to cancer liquid biopsy, especially for the detection of nasopharyngeal carcinoma and genomewide approaches for screening multiple types of cancer.
In recognition of his work, Prof. Lo has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2022 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, Future Science Prize in Life Sciences in China, widely regarded as the Chinese version of the Nobel Prize; the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine in 2014; the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, 2021 Royal Medal, the 2021 ESHG Mendel Award, the 2022 ISPD Pioneer Award, the 2023 inaugural Tengchong Science Prize and the 2024 Jiménez Díaz Lecture Award.

Prof. Lo is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Founding Member and Director of the Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong, a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.