Yu-Chan Chao (Chinese Taipei), born in 1952. A professor at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He received his PhD from the Department of Entomology, University of Arkansas, USA, and completed his postdoctoral training at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Cornell University.
He has been studying insect pathology for many years, with a special emphasis on baculovirus gene regulation in infected host insect cells. His laboratory is not only manipulating insect viruses for insect pest control, but also developing fluorescent technology and constructing recombinant viruses to aid research into insect pathology at the gene regulation, protein expression and miRNA interaction levels. He has published many high profile papers including the Journal of Virology, Nucleic Acids Research, and Nature.
He has served as Deputy Director of IMB from 2002 to 2005. He was then appointed as Dean of the College of Life Sciences from 2005 to 2007 at National Chung Hsing University, which is a highly-regarded agriculturally-oriented university. In 2006, he was elected as Chair Professor by the same university. Over the course of his academic career, he has received three Distinguished Research Awards from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan. He was elected as a MOST Distinguished Research Fellow in 2006. In 2013, he received the Merit MOST Research Award; this is the top award that MOST offers to professors and research fellows in Taiwan. He has been invited as a distinguished or keynote speaker to many international conferences. He was also the organizer of the Virology Session at the most recent XXIV International Congress of Entomology Symposium in Korea. In addition, he has served as an editor for many highly-regarded international journals, including currently for the Journal of Virology. Apart from his academic contributions, his work has also been reported by prominent international periodicals such as "Asia Weekly" and by several other international media outlets.