Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1995

Profiles Dr. John W. S. Ho Lecturer in Biochemistry Dr. Ho completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta and graduate studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Upon obtaining his Ph.D. in 1985, he worked in the Biochemical Genetics Lab at SUNYAB as a postdoctoral fellow for two years before joining the University of Utah, where he was a member of the academic staff until 1993. Prior to joining The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1994, he had a brief stint at the Hong Kong Polytechnic. His research interests span the fields of biological chemistry, biochemistry and environmental toxicology — with emphasis on the structural and functional studies of enzymes, porphyrin metabolism and heme biosynthesis. His current research involves specific chemical modifications and substrate specificity of cytochrome P450, ATPases and the development of biochemical markers of toxicants and biocides, and the analytical biochemistry of metabolites of heme biosynthesis. Dr. Ho has been listed in the Who's Who in Sciences and Engineering in the USA in 1993, and has been a recipient of the Fellowship of the American Institute of Chemists (FAIC). He is a member ofthe American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as an elected member of the New York Academy of Sciences. He has also served as referee/reviewer for scientific journals on chromatography (biomedical applications andmethodology) and analytical chemistry. Dr. Ho was a member of the Graphoanalysis Society of the USA, and the US Tennis Association. He enjoys playing tennis and analysing handwriting. Dr. Xu Lei Senior Lecturer in Computer Science Dr. Xu received his B.Eng. (1981) from the Harbin Institute of Technology and his M.Eng. (1984) and Ph.D. (1987) from Tsinghua University. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mathematics, Peking University, where he went on to become an associate professor. From 1989 to 1993, he worked at the Lappeenranta University of Technology (Finland), Concordia University (Canada), Harvard University (USA) and MIT (USA) as senior research associate, research associate, visiting scientist and postdoctoral associate respectively. In September 1993 Dr. Xu joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong as senior lecturer in computer science. He is concurrently honorary professor at the Information Science Centre and the National Laboratory on Machine Perception at Peking University. Dr. Xu has authoredmany academic papers on neural networks, computer vision, signal processing, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. He has been appointed as the technical programme committee co-chairman of the International Conference on Neural Information Processing to be held in Hong Kong in1996 ,and has chaired two NIPS postconference workshops in 1992 and 1994 respectively. In addition to being a regular reviewer for a number of international and Chinese journals on neural networks and computer vision, he is an associate editor of Neural Networks, of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks a nd o f t he International Journal of Neural Systems. Dr. Xu is a recipient of many awards, including the Young Teacher Prize awarded by the Chinese National Education Council Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (1988 ), the Beijing Young Profiles 34