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.

Kathy 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, Kathy is interested in mathematical modelling of a wide range of diseases such as influenza, RSV, MERS, COVID-19, polio, invasive pneumococcal disease, 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 vaccination with natural language processing.   

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 a co-investigator of Programme 1 of the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health (D²4H) at the Hong Kong Science Park and an investigator of HKU Global Health Institute.

Kathy is one of the core developers of HKU's first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Epidemics. She is an editorial board member of Epidemics and BMC Medicine. She is also a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Immunization and Vaccines-related Implementation Research (IVIR-AC). 

Awards

1. Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2023)
2. HKUMed Outstanding Research Output Award (2017, 2018, 2021, 2022)

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4777-388X