2015-03-21

On March 16, SUMC received an academic visit made by Prof. Zhengming Chen, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford.

On the morning, Prof. Chen had a meeting with some representatives of SUMC, including Dean Junhui Bian, Executive Dean Dongyang Huang, Dr. William Ba-Thein, Director of Shantou-Oxford Clinical Research Unit, and the Big Data team at SUMC. Dean Bian briefed on the overall development plan of SUMC and its preliminary plans for developing a Big Data project, while Prof. Chen made a presentation on recent developments and future directions in the field of epidemiology as well as his major research projects.

On the afternoon, Prof. Chen held a lecture entitled “Big data for population health and biomedical research: China Kadoorie Biobank study” to SUMC students and faculty. In his talk, he presented the important findings from the world’s largest blood-based prospective study, China Kadoorie Biobank, of which he is Principal Investigator in the UK, and its significance in healthcare.

Prof. Zhengming Chen is currently Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. He focuses his research on the environmental and genetic causes of chronic disease, evidence-based medicine and evaluation of widely practicable treatments for chronic diseases as well as efficient strategies for chronic disease control in developing countries. Over the past 20 years, Prof. Chen has led about ten large randomized trials and cohort studies involving over 750,000 individuals. Since 2003, he has been the lead principal investigator in the UK for the China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) prospective study of 0.5 million adults. In addition, Prof. Chen is very experienced in design and management of large epidemiological cohort studies and international multi-centre clinical trials, big data processing and analyses, as well as IT systems for medical studies.