Wei Jia

Professor Wei Jia is an internationally renowned scientist and a pioneer in the fields of metabolomics, gut microbiome research, and systems pharmacology. At the age of 36, he achieved the rank of full professor and has since accumulated over 30 years of experience leading interdisciplinary research programs in both academic and industrial settings.

He is Chair Professor and Vivian Taam Wong Professor in Integrative Medicine in the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy at The University of Hong Kong, and Director of the Center for Translational Medicine at Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital, affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He previously held senior appointments at Hong Kong Baptist University, the University of Hawaii Cancer Center, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tianjin University.

His research focuses on unraveling the intricate molecular mechanisms that connect metabolic disruptions in gut microbial-host co-metabolism to the development of metabolic disorders and gastrointestinal cancer. His laboratory operates a world-class metabolomics platform that quantitatively profiles endogenous small-molecule metabolites and trace elements from various biological specimens using advanced LC-MS/MS and GC-MS technologies.

Professor Jia has made groundbreaking discoveries in bile acid metabolism and gut-brain axis interactions. His work has identified novel microbial metabolites that serve as signaling molecules affecting host metabolic health, with important implications for understanding and treating conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), depression, and Alzheimer's disease. Recent work from the lab, published in Cell and Cell Metabolism, has traced sex differences in chronic liver disease to a microbiome-bile acid axis, shown how hyocholic acids shape neonatal immune tolerance, and used AI language models to map thousands of previously uncharacterized human bile acids.

The lab is also building AI-driven metabolomics, combining clinical data with machine learning and deep neural networks to support diagnosis and prognosis in liver and cardiovascular disease, depression, and mild cognitive impairment.

His research on the interaction between melamine in infant formula and childhood gut bacteria, leading to kidney toxicity, was selected as one of Science magazine's "Top Ten Scientific Breakthroughs" in 2013—a testament to the translational impact of his work on public health.