I obtained my bachelor degree in the Department of Biochemistry at the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a first-class honor and then Ph.D. in the University of Nottingham in U.K. Following postdoctoral training in the National Institute for Medical Research in U.K., I returned to Hong Kong in 2007 to join the Department of Biochemistry in HKU as Research Assistant Professor and became Assistant Professor in the Department of Anatomy since Nov 2013. I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in School of Biomedical Sciences since Nov 2019. My long-term research interest is to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying the complex cell migration events using neural crest cells in chick embryo as a model system and whether similar regulatory control in conferring neural crest migratory capacity also governs cancer metastasis. My previous work has revealed a key role of the Sox9 transcription factor in coordinating with the zinc-finger transcriptional repressor, Snail2, for neural crest specification, survival, and delamination. We further extended these findings and revealed a novel mechanism by which BMP and canonical Wnt signaling control Sox9 phosphorylation which facilitates the co-operation with Snail2 to trigger the onset of neural crest delamination essential for the subsequent differentiation events. Our recent work identified a Rho GTPase-activating protein (RhoGAP) Deleted in Liver Cancer 1 (DLC1) plays a crucial role in establishing trunk neural crest polarity and migration directionality that provides important insight into the causes of congenital diseases due to defective neural crest migratory behavior. Altogether, these findings will also provide an important molecular framework to understand how dysregulation of these developmental regulators could contribute to the progression of neural crest tumor such as melanoma and reveal new strategies for rational design of therapeutic agents to combat metastatic tumors.