Prof Zhiwei Chen is a Tenured Chair Professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy in the Department of Microbiology, School of Clinical Medicine, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKU).  He was conferred the Suen Chi-Sun Professorship in Clinical Science in 2024.

Prof. Chen received his PhD from New York University School of Medicine in 1996 and progressed from an NIH F32 Post-doctoral Fellow to Assistant Professor at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center of the Rockefeller University from 1996 to 2002. In 2007, he joined HKU as an Associated Professor and the Founding Director of the HKUMed AIDS Institute. He was a former Chairman of the Hong Kong Society for Immunology and an Executive Committee Member of the China AIDS Vaccine Initiative. He also served as a Member of Hong Kong Advisory Council on AIDS for the HKSAR Department of Health from 2008 to 2014.

His research focuses on AIDS/SARS/COVID-19 pathogenesis and immunotherapy, with a particular emphasis on the early events of viral infection. He pioneered the creation of HKU-patented platforms of technologies, including the PD1-based vaccine, the tandem anti-HIV-1 bi-specific antibody, and an anti-Δ42PD1 antibody drug for the fight against viral infection and cancer.  He has been ranked by Clarivate Analytics among the top 1% of researchers worldwide by citations and a Highly Cited Researcher in 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has won numerous research grants as PI from RGC GRF/CRF/TRS, ITC RAISe+, HMRF, NIH RO1, amfAR, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and so forth. He also won the HKU Knowledge Exchange Excellence Award 2019, Outstanding Researcher Award 2021 and Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award 2021.