Dr Reena Rajasuriar is a Clinical Pharmacist by training and an Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine, University Malaya (UM).  She also holds an adjunct position as a Fellow at the Department of Infectious Diseases, University of Melbourne, Australia.  She leads the research unit at the Department of Medicine, UM and is Head of the Immunotherapeutics Laboratory (ITL), a core immunology research laboratory at the Faculty of Medicine, UM.    Dr Rajasuriar completed her PhD in Immunogenetics at Monash University, Australia and now leads a translational research program in HIV and Aging at the Centre of Excellence for Research in AIDS (CERiA).  Her training as a clinical and basic scientist has afforded Dr Rajasuriar the expertise to perform multidisciplinary research spanning basic, clinical and implementation studies.  Her research focuses on understanding drivers of accelerated aging in people living with HIV and its interaction with functional aging outcomes.  She is also invested in understanding how integrated HIV care can best be implemented in resource limited settings to promote healthy aging.   Dr Rajasuriar has published extensively on the intersection of HIV and aging, and is an international leader in advancing the knowledge in this field, having delivered multiple plenaries at international forums, co-authored multiple opinion pieces and viewpoints as well as contributed to the development of consensus statements around this subject matter.  Together with members of her team, she was instrumental in developing the first ECHO training program on HIV and Aging for the Asia Pacific region to advance capacity building for health professionals providing care for people with HIV.  She is also the Principal Investigator of the only HIV and aging cohort in the Asia Pacific region studying aging from a multidimensional perspective, with over a decade of follow up (2014-2024).   Dr Rajasuriar’s work is funded by various national and international funding bodies including the National Institutes of Health, US, the American Foundation for AIDS Research and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Malaysia.  She has received multiple accolades including the Australia-APEC Women in Research Fellowship (2015), the Loreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Malaysia Fellowship (2016), the IAS Research-for-Cure Academy Fellowship (2018), the CIRA International Visiting Fellowship to Yale (2019), the Asian Universities Alliance (AUA) Scholars Award (2023) and most recently, the Fulbright Malaysian Scholar Award (2024). 

CHIEW Poh Shin (周宝芯, 周寶芯) is a senior lecturer in the Department of Malaysian Languages and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya. She earned her Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD from Nanjing Normal University, specialising in Chinese language and linguistics. Her primary research interests include phonetics and phonology, language variation, and language acquisition. Currently, she focuses on sociophonetics and prosodic studies, particularly in the varieties of Chinese like Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin. She has a deep passion for human speech and wants to explore how speech sounds connect with cognition, society, and culture. Beyond academic research, she enjoys science communication work, sharing the fascinating world of linguistics with the public. Here is her first experience on a podcast.

Amy Then is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Malaya. She obtained her Ph.D. in Fisheries Science from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, USA in 2014. Amy’s research interests are highly diverse and focused on animal- environment-human interactions to inform meaningful, data-driven conservation and management efforts in the coastal and marine realms. Currently, she is working on broad topics of mangrove ecology, restoration and ecosystem services assessment, shark and ray fishery assessment, marine megafauna bycatch and linkages between marine protected area and the well-being of both ecosystems and humans. She co-developed a number of successfully funded local and international proposals that were highly interdisciplinary in the last six years with funding from the Global Challenges Research Fund, Newton Fund, and British Council. To successfully deliver these projects, she had been actively using multiple science and social science approaches and with relevant stakeholder engagements at varying levels. In addition to scientific contributions in high-impact journals that included Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, and Ecosystems, she also has diverse experiences in organizing international meetings, including the Third International Symposium on Mangroves as Fish Habitat (MAFH3).