Prof. Donald C. Chang is currently Professor Emeritus in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He obtained a Bachelor degree (Physics) from the National Taiwan University (1965) and Master and Doctoral degrees (Physics) from Rice University (1970) in the USA. He was a joint faculty member in the Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, Texas, USA) and Rice University (Dept of Physics) during the 70s and 80s. In 1991, he joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as a founding faculty member. He was appointed Professor and later Chair Professor.
Prof. Chang has very broad research interests, including bio-medical physics, quantum physics and signaling mechanisms in living systems. He had conducted collaborative research in many institutions, including the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole (now part of University of Chicago), Peking University, Tsinghua University, NIH and University of California at San Diego (with Prof. Roger Tsien). He has published four books and over 130 papers in international journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS and Biophys J. Prof. Chang was a pioneer in the early development of spin-echo NMR for cancer detection. He was the first one to report that the NMR relaxation times undergo a progressive change when the biological tissue transforms from the normal morphological state to pre-neoplastic and then tumor state (PNAS 1972 and Nature 1972). He was the founding President of the Hong Kong Biophysical Society and a Fellow in the Hong Kong Institute of Science. He enjoys working on innovative projects and owns more than two dozen international patents. Professor Chang was elected a Fellow in the American Physical Society in 2023.