Wang, Linfa
Professor & Director
Emerging Infectious Diseases
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School
Singapore
Biography
Prof Wang is the Director of the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. Having completed his Bachelor's degree in 1982 at the East China Normal University, Shanghai China, Prof Wang went on to obtain his PhD at the University of California, Davis USA. His early research was at the Monash Centre for Molecular Biology and Medicine. In 1990, he joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) where he played a leading role in identifying bats as the natural host of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus. His research then extended from bat-borne viruses to bettering understanding virus-bat interaction and led an international team carrying out comparative genomic analysis of two bat species and discovered an important link between adaptation to flight and bat's ability to counter DNA damage repair as a result of fast metabolism and to co-exist with a large number of viruses without developing clinical diseases.
Research Interest
Bat-borne viruses, Clinical diseases.
Publications
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Bonaparte, M.I., Dimitrov, A.S., Bossart, K.N., Crameri, G., Mungall, B.A., Bishop, K.A., Choudhry, V., Dimitrov, D.S., Wang, L.-F., Eaton, B.T., and Broder, C.C. (2005) Ephrin-B2 ligand is a functional receptor for Hendra virus and Nipah virus. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 102: 10652-10657.
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Li, W., Shi, Z., Yu, M., Ren, W., Smith, C., Epstein, J.H., Wang, H., Crameri, G., Hu, Z., Zhang, H., Zhang, J., McEachern, J., Field, H., Daszak, P., Eaton, B.T., Zhang, S., and Wang, L.-F. (2005) Bats are natural reservoir of SARS-like coronaviruses. Science 310: 676-679.
