Catherine Hong Huan Hor

Catherine Hor is an Assistant Professor from the Hong Kong Baptist University, who is specialized in cellular neuroscience and molecular genetic research, with a long-standing research experience in the neurodevelopmental biology, primary cilium biology and neurological disorders.

Catherine obtained her PhD, majoring in developmental genetics at The University of Hong Kong. During her PhD training, Catherine studied mouse hindbrain neural tube patterning and Hedgehog signaling under the supervision of Professor Mai Har SHAM and Professor Chi Chung HUI at the Department of Biochemistry. She then joined Dr. Goh LK's lab at Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore as a postdoctoral research fellow, pursuing research topics in the realm of developmental and regenerative neuroscience.

In 2018, Dr. Hor obtained her first independent research grant, which is a prestigious and competitive national level research fund for young investigator-Young Individual Research Grand (YIRG) funded by the Ministry of Health, Singapore. In 2019, Catherine joined HKBU and established her lab at HKBU as a faculty member of the Department of Chemistry. In 2020, Dr. Hor was awarded one of the most competitive major research grant in Hong Kong, Collaborative Research Fund (CRF), in which she leads a team of international scientists from Hong Kong, Singapore and mainland China to investigate the cellular and neurobiology of viral infection.

Her research strives to understand the molecular and cellular pathology of hereditary neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, with particular interest in deciphering the neurochemistry and neurological roles of an under-appreciated but instrumental cell-cell signaling organelle, the primary cilium. Specifically, she is particularly intrigued to identify the cell type-specific functional membrane receptors on the primary cilia of neurons, as well as the immune cells in the brain. Her current projects also involve mouse disease models, and human induced-pluripotent stem cells disease modeling of ciliopathy-like disorders. Her team also actively engaged in cross-disciplinary collaborative projects with local and international scientists aiming to develop non-invasive biomarkers and therapeutics targeting pediatric neuropsychiatric disorders