Professor Sheikh Taslim Ali joined the School of Public Health of the University of Hong Kong in 2015. He completed his Bachelor of Science in Statistics (Honours) in 2006; and Master of Science in Statistics (Specialisation: Biostatistics, Econometrics) in 2008. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics (Stochastic Epidemic Modelling) in 2015. He had a brief industrial experience in analytics before joining for his Ph.D programme. He also successfully pursued his Split-Site Ph.D. training programme from School of Public Health, Imperial College London, during 2011-2012.

Professor Ali’s research interests are mathematical and statistical epidemiology, modelling of infectious diseases and optimisation of control policies. The main focus of his current research is to understand the infectious disease dynamics (including influenza, COVID-19, RSV, hand-foot-and-mouth disease, dengue and other vector-borne diseases) under the effect of time-varying interventions and seasonal forces (e.g. meteorological, pollutants and socio-economic). He develops the general statistical/mechanistic models for disease outbreaks prediction/forecast, with the aim of determining how the effectiveness of containment and mitigation policies depends on disease severity. He holds the research grants from Health and Medical Research Fund (HMRF) and General Research Fund (GRF) of Research Grants Council, Hong Kong as PI (HKD 9M) and Co-PI. He is a course coordinator of Introduction to Biostatistics (CMED6100), one of the core courses of the Master of Public Health curriculum at the University of Hong Kong.

Professor Ali is a Co-Investigator of the programme “AI-Enabled Causal Inference for Disease Control” (Programme 3) at the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health at the Hong Kong Science Park. He is an Editorial Board Member for PLOS Global Public Health journal. He also serves as an academic reviewer of scientific manuscripts for more than 25 international journals, including Nature Communication, Nature Human Behaviour, Eurosurveillance, Environmental Health Perspective, Emerging Infectious Diseases, BMC Infectious Disease, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Journal of Theoretical Biology, and Epidemics.

Awards:

• Research Fellowship Scheme (HMRF), Health Bureau, Govt. of Hong Kong SAR, 2024.
• The top 1% scholar worldwide by Citations (Clarivate Analytics), 2023, LINK.
• CSC Research Impact Awards 2021-highly commended entry (by Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, UK), LINK.
• Faculty Research Output Prize 2021 (HKUMed, HKSAR).
• Commonwealth Split-Site PhD Scholarship Award 2011-12, UK, (by Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, UK), LINK.
• Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) 2010-15 as JRF and SRF (by University Grants Commission, INDIA).
• Two Gold Medals for top academic excellence in M.Sc. (Statistics), 2008 (by Karnatak University, INDIA), LINK.