Heung-Chin Cheng completed a BSc Hons degree in Biology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He then completed a PhD at the University of California at Davis in kinase biochemistry, before post-doctoral work with the Medical Research Council Signal Transduction group at the University of Calgary, Canada. In 1993 he
joined the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department at the University of Melbourne. He has been instrumental in elucidating the structural basis of kinase inhibitors of cAMP-dependent protein kinase. He has determined the substrate specificity and regulation of Src-family kinases and the peptide substrates developed
are now widely used as specific Src kinase substrates by other researchers. Since 2002 he has been actively deciphering the molecular basis of regulation of Src kinase by CHK. His laboratory has discovered a novel inhibitory mechanism by which CHK inhibits Src kinases. His laboratory deciphered the catalytic mechanism of PTEN, an upstream regulator of the Parkinson’s disease PINK1 protein kinase. In collaboration with Dr. Culvenor his laboratory demonstrated for the first time that the PINK1 kinase encoded by the Parkinson’s disease-causative gene is a serine/threonine kinase and its kinase activity is down-regulated by diseaseassociated mutations.