Ho Ko 高浩

  • Innovation Award in 2020 at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ho Ko holds Bachelor of Medical Sciences (BMedSc), and Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He pursued a PhD in neuroscience under the supervision of Thomas Mrsic-Flogel at University College London (UCL), where he worked closely with Sonja Hofer and Lee Cossell to reveal fundamental rules governing the connectivity between neurons with different functional roles in the brain. Based on his PhD works, he won a runner-up award of the 2014 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology.

Ho Ko is currently an associate professor at the Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, Faculty of Medicine, CUHK. He also serves the associate director of the Margaret K.L. Cheung Research Centre for Management of Parkinsonism and the Lau Tat-chuen Research Centre of Brain Degenerative Diseases in Chinese, and a principal investigator at the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences (LiHS) and the Gerald Choa Neuroscience Institute (GCNI) of CUHK.

Leading a team with expertise in biology, chemistry and engineering, his current research works focus on three closely related themes:

  • Gliovascular dysfunction and therapeutic targeting in neurodegenerative disorders
  • Neural circuits mediating sensorimotor behaviors and their dysfunction in aging
  • Development of imaging tools and methods

Apart from a 2020 Croucher Innovation Award, his team's research works have been recognized by a 2021 Excellent Young Scientists Fund from the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China, the 2022 Sir David Todd Lectureship from the Hong Kong College of Physicians, and an inaugural 2023 Asian Young Scientist Fellowhip from the Future Science Prize Foundation.

Departmental page: http://neurology.mect.cuhk.edu.hk/owen-ko/ 

Lab website: http://neurology.mect.cuhk.edu.hk/kolab/index.html

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=TWC-NuEAAAAJ&hl=en