“Public health is often a neglected subject in academic medical circles. It is therefore a great testament to the foresight of the Medical Faculty that it should have included Public Health as one of its eight strategic research areas.
The endowment for the Sir Robert Kotewall Professorship will add to the already significant research strengths of the Department and will in particular allow greater understanding of the genetic and molecular determinants of health and disease and their interaction with environmental factors.”
Dr Ron Zimmern
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Sir Robert Kotewall Professorship in Public Health
Joseph T K Wu is a professor in the School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong (HKU). He specialises in mathematical and statistical modelling of diseases. His research aim is to develop practical analytics and strategies for disease control and prevention. He has worked on COVID-19, seasonal and pandemic influenza, hand-foot-and-mouth diseases, HPV, MERS, yellow fever, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer and breast cancer. He earned his PhD in Operations Research and BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT.
Professor Joseph Wu is the managing director of the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health (D²4H). His research programme in D²4H aims to develop AI technology and tools for global and personal health protection, with a particular focus on clinical NLP, epidemic nowcasting/forecasting and vaccine hesitancy.
Professor Wu is the director of HKU's first Massive Open Online Courseware (MOOC) Epidemics which has had more than 50,000 people enrolled since its first launch in 2014. He is the director of two Croucher Summer Courses (Vaccinology and Vaccine Hesitancy).
Professor Wu is co-editor-in-chief of Epidemics and an associate editor of PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. He is a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health. He was a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Immunization and Vaccines-related Implementation Research (IVIR-AC) during 2018 - 2023.
Joseph T K Wu
