Hue Sun Chan

Biography

Hue Sun Chan was born and raised in Hong Kong. Upon completing his undergraduate degree in physics there, he pursued graduate study in theoretical particle physics at UC Berkeley, specializing in regularization of quantum field theories. After receiving his PhD in 1987, he joined Ken Dill’s research group at UCSF, first as a postdoctoral fellow then as an adjunct faculty, and shifted his research interest to protein biophysics. As one of a few researchers who pioneered theoretical studies of protein folding in the late 1980s, Chan has made seminal contributions during his UCSF years. These include discovering that secondary-structure-like local order can be enhanced by global conformational compactness, developing simple exact lattice protein models such as the HP model that have been widely applied, characterizing the role of kinetic traps and their implications on the folding energy landscape, and coauthoring several influential reviews on folding. In 1998, he left San Francisco to take up his present appointment. After arriving in Toronto, Chan turned his attention to the physical origins of folding cooperativity. His research interests have also been broadened to include thermodynamics of solvent-mediated interactions, protein evolution, protein interactions involving intrinsically disordered proteins, and DNA topology (see Research Description). He has published more than 130 research papers, which have received a total of more than 13,500 citations (see complete list of publications and invited talks). He is an editorial board member of Proteins: Structure, Function & Bioinformatics.

Research Interest

Theoretical and Computational Investigations of Protein Folding, Interactions, and Evolution