Metal Ligand Chromophores for Bioassays

Professor Kenneth Kam-Wing Lo obtained his B.Sc. (1993) and Ph.D. (1997) degrees at The University of Hong Kong. From 1997 to 1999, he worked as a Croucher Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He joined the Department of Biology and Chemistry (currently Department of Chemistry) of City University of Hong Kong as Assistant Professor in 1999 and was promoted to Professor in 2011. He received The APA Prize for Young Scientist from The Asian and Oceanian Photochemistry Association in 2005 and The Distinguished Lectureship Award from The Chemical Society of Japan in 2011. He was one of the Chairs of the Gordon Research Conference Metals in Medicine 2018 and the Chair of the 23rd International Symposium on the Photochemistry and Photophysics of Coordination Compounds (ISPPCC 2019). He was awarded a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship from the Croucher Foundation in 2015. His research interest is the utilization of luminescent inorganic and organometallic transition metal complexes as biomolecular and cellular probes, with a focus on the development of intracellular sensors, photofunctional labels, bioimaging reagents, bioorthogonal probes, and activatable photosensitizers for photodynamic therapeutic applications.

Luminescent metal complexes as photochemical and biomedical tools.- Luminescent metal complex peptide conjugates for super resolution imaging.- Optical markers for polar lipids in live cells.- Time-gated luminescence detection of enzymatically produced small molecules.- DNA binding and imaging using luminescent transition metal complexes.- Metal complexes for phosphorescence sensing of biological metal ions.- Near infra-red emitting lanthanide complexes.- Biosensors and chemosensors for highly reactive molecules, environmental pollutants, and imaging.