Dr. Richard Yi Tsun KAO received his Ph. D. (Microbiology; under the supervision of Julian Davies) in 1999 from the University of British Columbia and subsequent postdoctoral training from Harvard Medical School. Richard joined the University of Hong Kong in 2001 as a Research Assistant Professor, first in HKU-Pasture Research Center, and later in the Department of Microbiology. Now he is the Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and the Director of Chemical Genetics Unit, Research Center of Infection and Immunology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong. Currently Dr. Kao’s research focuses on the application of chemical genetics in infectious diseases. His work on SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which was published in Chemistry & Biology in 2004, has established the world’s first model of chemical genetics in virology and illustrated that chemical genetic approach could be employed to probe most, if not all, druggable targets of a pathogenic virus. After the SARS work, Dr. Kao’s team employed similar approach to identify new druggable targets in influenza viruses and published in Nature Biotechnology in 2010 an article detailing the groundbreaking discovery of influenza A nucleoprotein as a druggable antiviral target and the compound nucleozin as a potent antagonist of the nucleoprotein. This is also the first time that a study led by local researchers in Hong Kong is published in Nature Biotechnology.