Dr Sharon (Ye Chun) Ruan received her Ph.D. degree from Sun Yat-Sen University in 2009, and afterwards went for postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital (USA) for 4 years. In 2013, she was recruited as a Research Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Since 2017, Dr Ruan has been appointed as Assistant Professor in Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at PolyU.

Dr Ruan’s research has focused on ion channels, a group of membrane proteins, and their related signaling transduction in reproduction/development and associated human diseases. Her work has yielded important findings including identifying the epithelial sodium channel as an essential player in embryo implantation (published in Nature Medicine, 2012) and labor (EMBO Molecular Medicine, 2018); and CFTR, another epithelial ion channel, in organ development (J Cell Sci., 2014) and metabolic diseases (Nature Communications, 2014). In addition, she has extended the research into new roles of ion channels in bone-associated regenerative medicine and made a major breakthrough for the mechanistic study on Mg2+-induced osteogenic effects (Nature Medicine, 2016).

Dr Ruan has won a couple of major awards such as “National Science and Technology Award in Women and Children’s Health” and successfully obtained funding support from General Program (2015-2018) by National Natural Sciences Foundation of China, General Research Fund (2014-2018), Early Career Scheme (2017-2020), Theme-based Research Scheme (Co-PI, 2017-2022) by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong and Health and Medical Research Fund (2017-2020) by Food and Health Bureau of Hong Kong.

Currently, Dr Ruan aims to continue her research on ion channels with a particular interest in developing ion channels into molecular targets in the diagnosis/treatment of human diseases.

Ion channels in reproductive health and diseases.
Ion channels in development, endocrine & metabolic diseases and bone-related regenerative medicine.