Dr. Kong earned his B.S. and M.S degrees in Biochemistry from Nanjing University in 1987 and 1990, respectively, and he completed his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Virology at the University of Massachusetts in 1996. He received his postdoctoral training in Molecular Immunology at Yale University 1996-2000, after which he joined the Department of Pathology at Case Western Reserve University as an assistant professor. Dr. Kong is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Pathology and Neurology and Associate Director of National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.

Dr. Kong’s research interests center on prion diseases and gene therapies, including public health risks of animal prions, animal modeling and characterization of novel human prion diseases, skin prions and early diagnosis of prion diseases, etiology of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), processing of the normal cellular prion protein, and gene therapy for prion disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases. He is also working on biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease. He has served on the editorial boards of a few journals, including Frontiers in Neuroscience, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, and Annals of Translational Medicine. He has served on multiple review panels for grant agencies and private foundations, such as NIH, USDA, MRC (UK), NC3Rs panel (UK), Alberta Prion Research Institute (Canada), Alberta Innovates (Canada), Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF)(Germany), Alzheimer’s Association, and Alzheimer’s Society (UK).