Pak Chung Sham studied medicine at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and was subsequently trained in psychiatry at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospitals in London. In 2000, he was appointed Professor of Psychiatric and Statistical Genetics at the MRC Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre at King’s College London. He was the Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Hong Kong from 2007 to 2011 and served as the Director of the Centre for Genomic Sciences from 2011 to 2019. Sham has developed new statistical methods for the analysis of genetic data and applied such methods to study the aetiology of psychiatric disorders and other complex disorders.