DrSheikh Taslim Ali

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Health, the University of Hong Kong, and a Visiting Researcher at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London, working with Dr Marc Baguelin. My primary research area is Biostatistics and Epidemiology for respiratory diseases (influenza and COVID-19, RSV, HFMD, measles, etc.), vector-borne diseases (dengue, chikungunya, etc.), and other communicable diseases (Ebola, etc.), with a growing interest in Environmental and Social Health for disease epidemiology and burden. The main focus of my research is to understand the disease dynamics and their drivers by integrating statistical, mechanistic, and AI models to infer epidemiological parameters, characterize disease transmission, and assess severity. Currently, I am extending my expertise by developing a general modelling framework for early detection of infections in communities, time-varying inference of population immunity, behaviour- and mobility-driven transmission risks, and assessing the impact of climate and climate change by using digital surveillance and AI-based large language models. These innovative tools are intended to be ensembled for better prediction of the risk of local epidemics or pandemics of these viruses and optimizing their proactive and cross-border interventions within a one-health approach regionally and globally.

I am a Health and Medical Research Fund Research Fellow supported by the Health Bureau, Govt. of Hong Kong SAR. The primary collaborative projects with Imperial are on 'developing methods for improving time-varying transmissibility and severity measures for respiratory diseases' and 'assessment of the risk of local transmission vector-borne diseases in Hong Kong, Greater Bay Area, in Mainland China and beyond' . My active collaborations for these projects include researchers from Imperial College London, UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Institut Pasteur, HKU, and others, along with my mentors Prof. Neil Ferguson, Prof. Benjamin Cowling, and Dr Marc Baguelin. Key outcomes of my works have been published in high-impact journals such as Science, Lancet Global Health, Lancet Public Health, Nature Communications, Science of the Total Environment. As Principal Investigator, I have secured HKD 10.3 million in research grants from the Research Grants Council, the Health and Medical Research Fund, Hong Kong SAR.