FAOBMB will welcome a new Treasurer from 1 January 2020. Professor Shannon Au of Hong Kong will take over from Professor Piamsook Pongsawasdi of Thailand who will have completed six years as FAOBMB Treasurer at the end of this year. FAOBMB recognises the excellent service that Piamsook has carried out during her term of office in this very important role for FAOBMB.
Shannon Au is currently a Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She obtained her BSc in Biology from Portsmouth University, UK in 1993 and Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Structural Biology from University of Hong Kong in 1998. She then received the Croucher Foundation Post-doctoral Fellowship and pursued her postdoctoral training in protein x-ray crystallography at both the University of Hong Kong and the University of Oxford, under the mentorship of Dr Veronica Lam and Dr Margaret Adams, respectively, to resolve the crystal structure of human glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase. Afterwards, she joined Prof David Barford’s lab to study the anaphase promoting complex at the Institute of Cancer Research, UK. She joined CUHK as an Assistant Professor 2003 and was promoted to full professor in 2019. She has served as an Assistant Dean (Student Affairs) of the Faculty of Science since 2015.
Her research interests focus on the structures and functions of macromolecular complexes in pathogenic bacteria, in particular, the flagella system in Helicobacter pylori and the PE-PPE complexes in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Her group applies a combination of biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology and structural biology approaches to elucidate the atomic basis of macromolecular assembly. She was the recipient of the Suffrage Science Award, Medical Research Council UK in 2014, for her scientific achievements in X-ray crystallography. She has served as an Academic Editor of PLoS One since 2014.
Shannon was the Secretary of the Hong Kong Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (HKSBMB) during 2007-2017. She will take up the position of Treasurer of FAOBMB from 1 January 2020.