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Submitted by Joseph Lopez, President, APFCB, IFCC EB Member
The APFCB's scholarship programme got off to a start when the first scholarship was awarded in July 2006. Funding for the programme has come mainly from the APFCB Philanthropic Fund which was established in 2005. The annual grant that was provided by the IFCC to regional federations in 2005 was used to seed the Fund and a similar grant received in 2006 was added to the original amount.
The scholarships are intended for providing opportunities to deserving clinical scientists in the region to undergo training and to present their work in conferences. The APFCB-Anon Scholarship, the first scholarship ever awarded by the APFCB, has been sponsored by a senior clinical biochemist from the Asia-Pacific region for 3 years. It is meant to enable a young scientist from the region, to attend each year, the prestigious Annual Scientific Meeting of the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists (AACB).
Besides the grants from the IFCC, the scholarship programme has received commitments from the APFCB's corporate members. With this support, we expect to award a number of travel awards to young colleagues from our region to present their work at the 11th Asian-Pacific Congress of Clinical Biochemistry to be held in Beijing in October next year, and training scholarships in the future.
The following is a brief profile of the recipient of the first APFCB-Anon Scholarship, Dr Ronald CC Wang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Hong Kong
Since obtaining his MBBS with honors in 1995, Ronald Wang has devoted his career to clinical research at the Prince of Wales Hosptail, CUHK, and the Westmead Hospital, the University of Sydney, New South Wales in Australia. He was awarded a PhD degree in Surgical Science in 1998 and has so far published over 40 papers. Ronald has been the recipient of several international scholarships and awards for analytical chemistry, molecular genetics and genomic and proteomic bioinformatics for training at the following centres: the Institute for Biochemistry at Humboldt University zu Berlin, Germany (DAAD fellowship) in 1999; the Center for Information Biology & DDBJ, National Institute of Genetics, Japan (JSPS fellowship) in 2001; and the Microarray Bioinformatics Centre, University of Oxford, UK (JSPS fellowship) in 2002. For conference participation, he has also received the Roche Award of the Hong Kong Society of Clinical Chemistry in 2002, the APCCB Regional Service Award in 2004, and the AACC International Travel Grant to IFCC Congress Orlando in 2005. Recently, Dr Wang visited the Embryology Research Unit, Children's Medical Research Institute, NSW Australia (CUHK Summer Grant) for molecular embryology research; and Department of Biomedical Science, Regeneration Medicine and Biofunction, Tottori University, Japan for stem cell research. At present, Ronald Wang teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students and undertakes basic science and clinical research at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the CUHK.
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