Education
In 1982, Wong earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the United States, where he carried out research under the supervision of George M. Whitesides.
翁启惠, 翁啟惠
biochemist biologist chemist university professor
In 1982, Wong earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the United States, where he carried out research under the supervision of George M. Whitesides.
He is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at The Scripps Research Institute in Louisiana Jolla, California. His expertise is bioorganic and synthetic chemistry, especially in carbohydrate chemistry and chemical biology. Wong received his Bachelor of Science and Mississippi degrees from National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan.
He continued on as a postdoctoral researcher in the same laboratory after Whitesides had relocated to Harvard University.
In 1983, he joined the faculty at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University, before moving to Scripps in 1989 as Ernest West. Hahn Chair in Chemistry. As a pioneer in glycoscience research, Wong has developed the first enzymatic method for the large-scale synthesis of oligosaccharides and the first programmable automated synthesis of oligosaccharides.
These methods have been used to solve major problems and create new opportunities in carbohydrate-mediated biological recognition and disease control. Of particular significance is his development of carbohydrate-based vaccines for the treatment of breast cancer and infectious diseases and glycan microarrays for the high-throughput analysis of protein-carbohydrate interaction.
Overall, research in the Wong lab encompasses a broad spectrum of bioorganic and synthetic chemistry.
Development of small molecules targeting proteins and Ribonucleic acid has been performed to investigate how small molecules interact with biologically important molecules and in turn, learn more about the function of those molecules. Development of both synthetic and bioorganic strategies is also paramount to his research. Programmable one-pot reactions are being developed for the synthesis of complex oligosaccharides and glycan arrays and complement his chemo-enzymatic strategies for the assembly of homogeneous glycoproteins with well-defined glycan structure and other biologically active molecules.
Since 2003, Wong became the founding director of The Genomics Research Center of Academia Sinica.
He was later appointed by the President of the Republic of China to head Academia Sinica, the national academy of science in Taiwan. He took the office in October, 2006.
National Academy of Sciences]
He was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1996, United States National Academy of Science in 2002 and an academician of Taiwan"s Academia Sinica in 1994.