Assistant Professor of School of Medical and Health Sciences of Tung Wah College, Dr. Brian Kot, won the RU Dunn Award in recognition of his outstanding performance and excellent presentation skills at “The 47th International Association for Aquatic Animal Medicine (IAAAM) Conference”. He is the first Asian to receive this honour.
On May 21-26, Dr. Kot attended the IAAAM Conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA, with Mr. Henry Tsui (Research Assistant of School of Medical and Health Sciences) and 5 Bachelor of Medical Science (Hons) (BMS) students (Mr. Chris Lam, Mr. Ashton Ling, Mr. Bosco Wong, Mr. Kyle Wong and Mr. Adams Yuen). This annual international conference is a remarkable event which brings together worldwide academia, scientists and professionals, making it an interactive platform to facilitate knowledge exchange and research collaboration.
Dr. Kot proudly led his research team to present their research findings to over 350 scholars and experts from the aquatic animal medicine field. They also exchanged views with each other. Dr. Kot summarized his project findings on the postmortem pathological investigation of stranded cetaceans in the Hong Kong waters by virtopsy and conventional necropsy, which is funded by the Research Grants Council in 2014/15. Whereas Mr. Tsui and the 5 undergraduate students presented their works on cranial cervical dislocation in stranded cetaceans, the fusion pattern of vertebral non-epiphyseal suture in Indo-Pacific finless porpoise, and the image reformation techniques in virtopsy.
At the occasion, Dr. Kot was honored with RU Dunn Award, which has been inherited from the past awardee to the new awardee in every IAAAM conference over the past 20 years. Dr. Kot had been greatly encouraged by the recognition of his work, he said, “It is a great honour to receive such a valuable award at the conference. I would like to relay my thanks to my research team and everyone who had offered their kind assistance during the research process. I hope more TWC students, likeminded individuals and experts can come together and contribute collectively to the development of the aquatic animal medicine field through academic exchanges and conferences like the IAAAM in the future.”