Professor Ian Wong has been appointed as Regius Professor of Pharmacy at Aston University

Professor Wong is a pharmacoepidemiologist. His research focuses on the application of international healthcare big data to evaluate the use of medicines so that patients will benefit from safer medications.

He has led several government-funded large research programmes in Europe, UK and Hong Kong to evaluate the safety of ADHD treatment, psychotropic medications in children and Covid-19 vaccine.

Professor Wong qualified as a pharmacist in 1992 and received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1998. In 2002, he became the founding director of the Centre for Paediatric Pharmacy Research at the School of Pharmacy, University of London, and the UCL Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital.

After joining Hong Kong University in 2011 as Head of the Department of Pharmacology & Pharmacy, Professor Wong led the accreditation of the BPharm programme by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board of Hong Kong.

Professor Wong has also advised the Departments of Health in England and Hong Kong, the World Health Organization, the European Medicines Agency, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Aston was one of just 12 institutions awarded a prestigious Regius Professorship by HM The Queen to mark her 90th birthday in 2016, and is the only university to hold a Regius Professorship in pharmacy.

A Regius Professorship is a rare award with only 14 created since the reign of Queen Victoria. Historically they were limited to a handful of ancient universities in the UK and Ireland such as Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin. It is a mark of exceptionally high standards of research and teaching.