Rumana Akhter Saifi, MSS, MA, MPH (Epid-Biostatistics), PhD (Demography) Area of Interest: Demography, Implementation Research, Population and Reproductive Health, Epidemiology and Bio-statistics   CAREER SUMMARY: I come with 17 years of experience in research, teaching, and research administration. I am a Faculty at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine Faculty of Medicine (FOM), Universiti Malaya (UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My present teaching portfolio at FOM includes (1) Medical statistics (2) Research Methodology (3) Practicum in Health Research Ethics (4) Qualitative Inquiry In Public Health (5) Ethics, Law, and Health (6) Principles and Methods of Social Epidemiology and (7) Implementation Research. Over the years, I have also been developing and teaching courses on the Philosophy of Health Systems and Health Policy Research, Applied Statistics in Social Research, and Time Series Analysis. I am committed to expanding the local reach of Implementation Science and have been serving as a Faculty Scholar for the Malaysian Implementation Science Training (MIST) program, a collaborative effort of UM and Yale University, US. As the former Head and Associate Head of CERiA: Centre of Excellence for Research in Infectious Diseases and AIDS. Faculty of Medicine (FoM), Universiti Malaya (UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I have overseen the entire research portfolio of CERiA. CERiA has been the leading Centre in Malaysia conducting HIV and infectious disease-related research in various fields including bio-medical, social-behavioral, clinical, and implementation research. In my role, I have overseen the progress of research projects starting from grant writing to IRB submission, to data collection, to analysis, to dissemination, ensuring efficiency and smooth workflow. Additionally, my responsibilities include review of grant agreement(s) to ensure compliance; review of financial statements; and preparation of financial audit, and program reports. During my time at CERiA, it has been identified as the most productive research centre of the Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya that conducts innovative and interdisciplinary research combining epidemiological, biomedical, and socio-behavioral approaches, focusing HIV prevention and treatment in key populations. With an excellent academic background, I started my career with ICDDR, B in Bangladesh. I stood 9th in Secondary and 6th in Higher Secondary Examination in Dhaka Board, Bangladesh. Over time, I specialized in mixed-method research. My major research expertise includes designing and conducting primary research projects, monitoring of outcomes, evaluation of programs, scaling-up interventions, analyzing and interpreting quantitative and qualitative data, designing and conducting large data collection surveys, managing and analyzing large data sets, and data trend analysis. For the last 17 years, my research focus has been on population health and health policy across diversified cultural contexts from cross-border areas of irregular migrants to conservative Muslim rural areas to urban metropolitan to urban slums to hard-to-reach areas; and across various disadvantaged population groups from young adolescents in early marriage to men who have sex with men (MSM) to sex workers to transgender to injection drug users to prisoners to fishermen. Working in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and New Zealand for the last 17 years gave me the opportunity to understand both developing and developed country settings. I’m acting as a faculty member of the Master of Health Research Ethics Program, jointly developed by Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, US, and the Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Fogarty International Center. I’m acting as a faculty scholar on a Fogarty Science of Implementation Training program jointly developed by Yale School of Public Health and Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, and Universiti Malaya, Malaysia which ultimately aims to create a regional implementation research center hub in Malaysia. My academic background is a blend of Demography, Public Health, Epidemiology, and Social Science. I hold a Doctor of Philosophy in Demography and Masters in (1) Public Health (Epidemiology and Bio-statistics) (2) Population and Reproductive Health Research and (3) Social Science.

Dr. Li Ran is Senior Lecturer at Institute of China Studies, Faculty of Art and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya. She obtained her doctoral degree in Economics from Department of Economics, Universiti Malaya in 2014. Her specialization is in the transformation of China’s state enterprises, state enterprise system and China’s political-economic system, and her current areas of research include China’s global strategy and China-Malaysia economic relations. Her previous writings have appeared in a number of international journals such as China: An International Journal, Cities, International Journal of China Studies, and Journal of Contemporary Asia. Moreover, her doctoral thesis was published as a book by a reputable publisher Palgrave Macmillan. She also wrote for Sin Chew Daily as a column author regularly.

Outline of Work profile: I was given a scholarship by concerns in England (1974) to complete my higher Secondary education; I then read the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge, specializing in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical and Physical Chemistry. I worked as a researcher with T.K. Lim in University of Malaya examining his Spin Free Q.M.(1980-82) and then went to the University of Georgia, Athens, (USA)  where I wrote my own dissertation in Thermodynamics (1986)  under the supervision of Darwin W Smith.  He  encouraged me never to build on any other person\\\'s foundations, nor to attempt any "me-too" science and fashions, which has become during the intervening years the central  paradigm in the control, management  and administration of science worldwide. This advise seems to have made a permanent impression on me, although  this recommended thorny pathway might  lead one to confront  many a Goliath; others -more pragmatic-  might interpret the recommendation as inviting one to tilt  at windmills.  He seemed to sense that with intense work and hope, communities and peoples could solve their own problems with economy, capability and satisfaction, rather than to opt for   external ordering through  compliance and indifference to whatever resources that could be cultivated and utilized proximately. Perhaps he had overestimated the quality of independence and historical recollection, anamnesis, value-attribution  and cultural coherence  of the many peoples of at least Afro-Asia. I briefly obtained a post-doctoral fellowship at Montana State University where I   studied  Statistical  systems, developing a theory of recoverable transitions. I then returned to Malaysia  (1989),  where I  have worked as an academic  ever since. In the year 1994-1995, I spent my  first sabbatical in K.I.L., Slovenia. In 2000-2001, I  spent my  second sabbatical leave at the Physical Chemistry Institute, Trondheim, Norway. The third sabbatical (2007)   was spent  in (i) the Physics Laboratory (HUT, Helsinki) and (ii) Arrhenius Laboratory, Sweden with Prof. A. Laaksonen  studying charged interactions in MD. Research Interests: Up to 2008, I had been working intensely on various fundamental topics in especially thermodynamics and Molecular Dynamics, producing many  new theorems, and critiquing many fundamental ones, such as Liouville\'s theorem, which underpins so much of Quantum and Classical thermodynamics.  In recent times, under the encouragement of Prof Keshav from the Physics Department, I am also supervising students in routine Applied DFT theory, polyelectrolyte simulations and recently, in heavy ion contamination of water sources.  I view these as training programs which has temporarily -I hope- put an end to my own research and thinking, but perhaps it is important to ensure that  people can be trained in part to build manpower capacity , but again suitability of training is a complex issue that cannot be reduced to blind numbers and procedures. I am also keen on communicating with people who are concerned with scientific media development that is accessible and available to communities of especially low financial capability and resources, and of the development of sustainable science based on independent solutions to  actual  problems immediately confronting the researcher  along historical lines and in terms  of  the  value attribution that such endeavors should or could generate. My  awards  and recognitions include a Bronze Medal (Expo Science,2006, U.M.)  and listings in Who’s Who in the World   and Who’s Who in Asia (Marquis 2007). I am also keen in relating to people who have an interest and passion in wishing to investigate some aspect of nature that is within my capability and interests.  All too  often, scholarship has been reduced to predefined mechanical functioning –that can be defined with various Key Performing Indices-   like a component within a pre established machine, whereas  good  scholarship involves movement into the unknown, where there is no pre-established structure and where the risk factor and unpredictability factor are  very high . Field of Expertise: Thermodynamics, Molecular Dynamics Simulations (using own algorithms), General Theory  of Physical systems Research interests: Molecular dynamics of hysteresis dimer chemical reaction (to 2006) and theory of chemical interaction from 2006 -2007 (MD of dimer reactions using  conventional potentials without hysteresis) 2007 – 2010 MD  of charged systems and the electromagnetic field