Prof. Dr. Chan Kok Gan is a distinguished microbiologist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges molecular biology, genomics, microbial communication, and biosafety law. He is currently a Professor at University of Malaya, where he leads research in microbial genomics, quorum sensing, quorum quenching, genome biology, next-generation sequencing, biosafety laws and intellectual property law in biotechnology. His contributions span genomics, microbial communication, and conceptual innovation rather than single isolated discoveries. 

Prof. Chan holds double Bachelor and Master degrees in Microbiology and laws, and PhD in Molecular Microbiology, with a rare combination of science and law.

Prof. Chan is prolific researcher,  with >500 WoS WoS publications in high-impact journals including Nature, Nature Communications. His work has garnered tens of thousands of citations (>29,830 citations, h index 86, Google Scholar ). He received fundings gloablly, eg. Malaysia Toray Science Foundation research grant, >15 French Fellowships, Hubert Curien Partnership-Hibiscus, SEAOHUN Award, UK Prime Minister’s Initiative II grant, 3 China Governments grants, JSPS Award and many Malaysia fundings. 

Prof. Chan has received numerous research awards and recognitions, including a consistent ranking in Research.com’s listings of Top Microbiologist and and Leader in Biology/biochemistry in Malaysia; Malaysia Toray Science Foundation (MTSF) Science and Technology Award, JSPS Award. He was listed as the World’s Top 2% Scientists consecuvtive for 7 years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026) by Stanford University/Scopus in both categories of “Current Year” and “Career”. He has been listed as World’s Top 0.09% Scientist by ScholarGPS.com in "Quorum Sensing", and ranked First in the categories of “quorum quenching”, “genomes” , “multidrug resistant pathogens” by Google Scholar.

Prof. Chan made several first discoveries in Malaysia and globally, including (i) discovered firstly, and coining the term bacterial “signalling confusion”; (ii) coexistence of quorum sensing and quorum quenching in some bacteria, and (iii) quorum quenching molecules from Malay, Chinese and Indian medicinal herbs and secured several patents,  (iv) characterising novel quorum sensing and quenching genes, (v) novel bacterial genus and species, (vi) he published Malaysia’s first complete bacterial genome 15 years ago when next-generation sequencing was still globally scarce.

Prof. Chan is Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia (FASc) elected in 2017 at the age of 45, and several fellowships in international learned academies. A novel bacterial species of a novel genus was named in honoured of Prof Chan’s contribution in microbiology:  Chania multitudinisentens gen. nov., sp. nov.

Prof. Chan is world’s leading expert in bacterial quorum sensing, quorum quenching, genome biology, biosafety laws and whole genome sequencing. After publishing the first bacterial complete genome in 2013, Prof Chan then pioneered into multi-OMICs technology, providing a new dimension of research in microbiology and genome biology.

To date, Prof. Chan is the leading expert in NGS, multi-OMICs (genome, plasmidome, resistome, virome, oncogenome, transcriptome, methylome, microbiome, metagenome, lipidome, metabolome).