13 Facts About Rocky Tuan

Rocky Tuan Sung-chi is a Hong Kong medical researcher and bioengineer who served as the vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2018 to 2025.

Rocky Tuan was the director of the Center for Military Medicine Research and an associate director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Rocky Tuan continues to serve as the director of Center for Cellular and Molecular Engineering at Pitt, despite his current academic position in Hong Kong.

Rocky Tuan continued his postdoctoral research at Rockefeller and then began a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, first with Melvin J Glimcher and later with Jerome Gross.

Rocky Tuan began his independent research career in 1980 when he joined the department of biology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rocky Tuan served as the director of orthopaedic research and vice chair of the department, and later took on the role of academic director of the institution's MD-PhD joint degree program.

In 2001 Rocky Tuan left Jefferson to take an intramural research position at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, one of the United States National Institutes of Health, where he became chief of the newly established Cartilage Biology and Orthopaedics Branch.

Eight years later, he and his wife, fellow NIH scientist Cecilia Lo, were recruited to the University of Pittsburgh, where Rocky Tuan joined the departments of orthopaedic surgery and bioengineering and became the founding director of the newly established Center for Cellular and Molecular Engineering.

In 2017, Rocky Tuan was appointed as the eighth vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

On 18 October 2019, Rocky Tuan released an open letter in which he detailed some of the alleged police abuses that he had heard from his students, calling these "serious allegations from a human rights point of view" and urging the police to protect the rights of those arrested.

Rocky Tuan said he would write to Chief Executive Carrie Lam requesting an independent investigation of his students' cases outside existing mechanisms.

Rocky Tuan was succeeded as vice-chancellor and president on 8 January 2025, following an earlier resignation.

Rocky Tuan's group has expertise in the study of adult stem cells and in the development of the musculoskeletal system.