Dr Sharon (YC) 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. In May 2022, Dr Ruan was promoted as Associate Professor.
Dr Ruan’s research has focused on ion channels, a group of membrane proteins, and their related signaling transduction in reproduction, endocrinology, development and associated human diseases. Her work has yielded important findings including identifying novel roles of ion channels and their related signaling pathways in embryo implantation (published in Nature Medicine 2012; Theranostics 2019), labour (EMBO Molecular Medicine 2018), organ development (J Cell Science 2014) and endocrine/metabolic diseases (Nature Communications 2014). In recent years, she has extended the research into new roles of ion channels in musculoskeletal physiology and diseases, and made major breakthroughs in understanding the osteogenic effect of orthopaedic implant-derived magnesium ion (Nature Medicine 2016) as well as ion channel-associated bone disease (Bioactive Materials 2021).
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 (PI, 2015-2018; PI, 2021-2024) by National Natural Sciences Foundation of China; General Research Fund (PI, 2014-2018), Early Career Scheme (PI, 2017-2020), Theme-based Research Scheme (Co-PI, 2017-2022), Area of Excellence (Co-PI, 2021-2029)  by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong; and Health and Medical Research Fund (PI, 2017-2020; PI, 2022-2023) 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 reproductive, endocrine and musculoskeletal diseases.