Piu Chan, MD, PhD

Professor and Director, Department of Geriatrics, Neurology, and Neurobiology, Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University

Professor Chan is well known for his translational research on neurodegenerative disorders and other age-related disorders. He has been working on developing models for CNS diseases including non-human primate models of Parkinson’s disease and dyskinesia. He has been studying familial and susceptibility genes and a variety of biomarkers for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases in a few unique cohorts in China aimed for prediction and prevention of neurodegenerative diseases. He has initiated projects investigating the role of polyphenols (funded by M. J. Fox foundation) and Traditional Chinese Medicine in two multi-center trials. He is currently the director of the National Center of GCP Trials for Neurodegenerative Disorders. He has been the PI for six registration clinical trials including Phase I-III trials of a recently approved drug developed by a domestic company by SFDA. He is an ad hoc consultant for the State Food and Drug Administration of China.

Professor Chan is the committee member for the Movement Disorder Society (MDS) “Task Force on the definition of Parkinson’s disease” and “Telemedicine Task Force”. Dr. Chan’s center is the only Chinese team participated the International LRRK2 Consortium and Apple’s mPower project.

Professor Chan has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers and served as editorial members of more than 15 international and Chinese journals. In 2002, he attained First Award for Scientific Achievement from both Ministry of Education and Chinese Medical Association in the People's Republic of China.

Professor Chan is the Director, Parkinson Disease Center of Beijing Institute for Brain Disorders. and Vice President of the Chinese Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics, council member of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG), and Secretary of the IAGG Asia-Oceania Region. He is also the vice President of the Chinese Association of Geriatrics, General Secretary of Society of Geriatrics of the Chinese Doctor’s Association, and the committee member of the Society of Geriatrics of the Chinese Association of Medical. He is the director of the Chinese Parkinson Study Group and deputy director of Committee on Parkinson’s disease and Movement Disorders of the Chinese Neurology Association. He has been appointed as the Deputy Director and Principal Investigator of Chinese National Human Genome Center Beijing since 2001. He was the President of the Society of Chinese Neuroscientists in America from 1998 to 2000 and the Secretary of Asia-Pacific Society for Neurochemistry from 2000 to 2006.

Professor Chan graduated from Hunan Medical College in Changsha and became a neurologist after the fellowship training. He later acquired his Doctor of Philosophy in neurosciences from Sun Yan-Sen University of Medical Sciences in Guangzhou followed by postdoctoral training at the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, California of USA, where he spent more than 10 years as senior scientist before returning to Beijing in 2000.