Global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have largely been suboptimal due to significant underdevelopment of infrastructure, human capital and analytics in pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR). In particular, epidemic nowcasting has been universally challenging because it requires distilling informative or actionable insights from diverse range of real-world data which are often biased. Misinterpretation, misrepresentation or otherwise misuse of these nowcasts will fuel infodemics, as we have learned to our detriment during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will discuss some lessons learned from COVID-19 and how we can strengthen pandemic PPR in the Age of Information.
Dr Kathy Leung received her BS in Biological Sciences from School of Life Sciences and BA in Economics from China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, MPhil, and PhD from School of Public Health at The University of Hong Kong. Dr Kathy Leung was initially a wet-bench trainee in biochemistry working to elucidate the signalling pathways of innate immunity against virus infections. Later she found her interest lies more in mathematics and statistics involved in biological processes. In recent years, Dr Kathy Leung is interested in mathematical modelling of a wide range of diseases such as influenza, MERS, COVID-19, hand-foot-and-mouth disease, HPV, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer, and breast cancer. She also conducts epidemiological and economic evaluations of disease intervention strategies, such as HMFD vaccination, public health and social measures against COVID-19, and risk-based breast cancer screening. Leveraged on the latest development of data science, she also uses machine learning to interpret SARS-CoV-2 genomic data and participates in the development of tools to tackle misinformation about COVID-19 vaccination with natural language processing. Dr Kathy Leung is a member of HKU’s COVID-19 Response Team and has contributed to the earliest studies about COVID-19 epidemiology. She is the principal investigator or co-investigator of research studies funded or commissioned by the General Research Fund and Health and Medical Research Fund. She is one of the core developers of HKU’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Epidemics, and also an investigator of Programme 1 of the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health (D²4H) at the Hong Kong Science Park.
Clean water and clean air are vital for public health. This project focuses on developing high-efficiency and environmentally sustainable filters for removing harmful air/water pollutants. The team has developed novel architectures and functionalities for the filters to achieve high permeance, high removal efficiency, and excellent reusability.
