Suen Chi-Sun Professorship in Clinical Science
Chair Professor in Psychiatric Genomics
Co-Director, State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Academic Lead, Centre for PanorOmic Sciences
Director of Academic Developments, Department of Psychiatry
Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong
BA (Cantab), BM BCh (Oxon), MSc (Lond), PhD (Cantab), MRCPsych
Email: pcsh@am@hnoku.com.hk
GWAS NGS PRS MR Psychiatric Stats
Prof. Sham is an internationally recognised expert in human genomics, psychiatric genetics, epidemiology, and statistical methodology. He has co-authored more than 800 papers cited over 168,000 times (H-index 158, i10-index 774; Google Scholar), and has been listed among the top 20 Chinese scientists in medicine worldwide for three consecutive years by research.com (2022–2024).
Trained at the University of Cambridge (BA, MB BChir, PhD in Statistical Genetics), the University of Oxford (BM BCh), and Birkbeck College, University of London (MSc in Applied Statistics and Operational Research). He became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (MRCPsych) in 1989. Prior to joining HKU, he held faculty appointments as Senior Lecturer / Reader at the Institute of Psychiatry, London (1994–2000) and as Professor of Psychiatric and Statistical Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London (2000–2006).
- Research themes
- Aetiology and genetics of psychiatric disorders — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression — through genetic-epidemiological investigation
- Statistical methodology for linkage analysis, genome-wide association studies, heritability estimation, polygenic risk prediction, and Mendelian randomization
- Whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing for the identification of causal variants in Mendelian and complex disorders, with applications to East Asian populations
- Multi-omics integration and causal inference for dissecting gene-environment and gene-phenotype relationships
- Major contributions
- PLINK (Purcell et al., 2007) — the de-facto standard toolset for GWAS and population-based linkage analyses, cited over 30,000 times
- lassosum (Mak et al., 2017) — one of the earliest polygenic-score methods based on penalised regression on GWAS summary statistics
- Genetic Power Calculator, GATES, HYST, KGGSeq — widely used tools for study design, gene-based testing, and rare-variant prioritisation
- Foundational work on linkage analysis (Curtis & Sham, 1995), the multi-allele TDT (Sham & Curtis, 1995), gene-based association testing (Neale & Sham, 2004), unifying frameworks for genetic risk prediction (So & Sham, 2010), and reciprocal-causation models for robust Mendelian randomization (Liu et al., 2023)
- Honours & awards
- China Leader in Medicine, research.com (2022, 2023, 2024)
- Grammer Research Award, European Spine Society (2022)
- Robert Elston Award for Outstanding Paper, International Genetic Epidemiology Society (2017)
- David Fulker Award for Best Paper, Behavior Genetics Association (1999, 2021)
- Justice of the Peace, Hong Kong SAR (since 2017)
- Editorial & service
- Associate Editor, GENETICS — Genetics Society of America (since 2025)
- Editor-in-Chief, Human Heredity (2017–2023)
- Executive Committee, International Genetic Epidemiology Society (2017–2020)
- Founding member and core participant, Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC), Genetics of Osteoarthritis Consortium (GO), EU-GEI
- Scientific Advisory Committee, Hong Kong Genome Institute (since 2020); Central Committee on Genetic Services, Hospital Authority Hong Kong (since 2013)
- Funding
- Principal or co-PI on 36 funded research projects (~RMB 212 million in total), supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Wellcome Trust, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, and others
- Training
- Supervised or co-supervised over 40 PhD students. Notable former trainees include Prof. Benjamin Neale (Harvard Medical School / Broad Institute) and Prof. Shaun Purcell (developer of PLINK and pioneering work on polygenic risk scoring)
- Personal websites
HKU Scholars Hub Page
Departmental Page
Google Scholar Page
ORCID
- Publications
- 800+ papers; 168,000+ citations; H-index 158; i10-index 774. Highlights at Selected Publications on the homepage; full list on Google Scholar or ResearchGate.
- Other interests
- Game theory
