Professor Yuan-Hua Chou graduated from the Medicine school of the Taiwan National Defense Medical Center in 1988 and entered the Pharmacology Research Institute in the same year to conduct research on the determination of intracellular sodium ion activity. After completing psychiatric residency training in 1996, he went to the University of Toronto, Canada, for further studies. In 1997, he was admitted to the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden to pursue a doctoral degree, focusing on positron emission tomography research on dopamine and serotonin receptors in the brain. He obtained his doctoral degree in 2001 and returned to Taiwan.
During his 20 years in Taiwan, he served as the department director at Tri-Service General Hospital and Taipei Veterans General Hospital. He also founded the Institute of Brain Science at National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University and the Clinical Innovation Center at Taipei Veterans General Hospital. He has published over 100 international papers, with his most notable research being on serotonin transporters in the brains of patients with bipolar disorder undergoing imaging, the changes in dopamine transporters in the brains of carbon monoxide poisoning suicide patients, and the correlation with clinical cognitive function.
In addition to serving as Secretary-General and Standing Committee member of the Taiwan Psychiatric Association, and Secretary-General of the Asian Psychiatric Association, he also chaired the World Psychiatric Association Preparatory Committee in 2015. He is a fellow of the Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologicum and a member of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry. In 2023, he joined Taichung Veterans General Hospital, where, with the strong support of Superintendent Shi-An Chen, Professor Chou established five major centers, the Human Brain Research Center, Virtual Mental Health Center, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Research Center, Eating Disorders Research Center, and Virtual Reality Research Center. He has served as Deputy Superintendent to the present.
