Dr. Zahiruddin Fitri is a Senior Lecturer in the Building Surveying Department at the Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Malaya. Specialising in building pathology (or the science of what goes wrong with buildings), he earned his PhD in Concrete Technology from the University of Dundee in 2012. From 2014 to 2024, he served as Head of E-Learning at the university and was Deputy Director of the Academic Development Centre (ADEC) from 2020 to 2022.   A key resource in teaching and learning, he has conducted extensive training for academics and co-authored university policies on e-learning. He has also played a crucial role in shaping Malaysia’s higher education landscape through his involvement in MEIPTA, a national think tank for e-learning policy and European-level projects like Erasmus+ CBHE.   Passionate about pedagogical innovation, he actively writes on technology-enhanced learning and contributes to national and international education initiatives, and have given several keynote speeches on the topic.    He can be seen riding his bicycle every day to work.

Dr Sanjay Rampal was appointed Executive Director of the Department of Research Development under the Office of Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research & Innovation), Universiti Malaya in March 2025. He is a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and a Public Health Physician at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya. Dr Rampal was medically trained in India and served in the Ministry of Health, Malaysia from 1998 to 2005. The clinical experiences from his early medical career helped him realize that treating one patient at a time was insufficient and that more could be done by intervening at a population level. He improved his basic epidemiology and biostatistics knowledge by completing an MPH degree in 2004 from Harvard University. He joined Universiti Malaya in 2005, intending to strengthen the research skills of the Malaysian medical and public health community. He completed his PhD in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University in 2014. He was Certified in Public Health (CPH) by the US National Board of Public Health Examiners in 2013. Dr Rampal’s research has focused primarily on the epidemiology and prevention of cardiovascular disease. He has investigated the etiological and prognostic roles of various factors with diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These factors include gender, ethnicity, nutrition, obesity, metabolic-associated fatty liver disease, dyslipidemia, and other structural determinants of health. He has further investigated the role of these traditional cardiovascular risk factors in cancer development. He hopes to leverage this information further to design and implement better prevention programs that reduce the number of new patients our healthcare system sees. In recent years, he has applied his epidemiological expertise to communicable diseases. He investigated the roles of Obesity and Diabetes on the prognosis of Dengue Severity. His methodological interests include improving research methodology, biostatistics, epidemiological designs, regression models, causal inference, multiple imputations, measurement error, and propensity scoring. Dr Rampal lectures in epidemiology, biostatistics, and research methods at Universiti Malaya. He has supervised 21 Doctoral, 10 4-year Master of Public Health, and 35 Master’s candidates to completion. He actively supervises 10+ postgraduate students. Since 2005, he has provided many methodological and biostatistical consultations to graduate students and clinical researchers. Dr. Rampal has published 89 WOS and 94 SCOPUS papers (h-index: 32 WOS, 39 SCOPUS; WOS Citations without Self-citations: 17,330) and supervised over 65 postgraduate students.   Dr Rampal is a Fellow of the Academy of Medicine Malaysia and was the past honorary secretary for the College of Public Health Medicine from 2006-2009 and an executive member from 2016 to 2024. He has chaired the Public Health Medicine Specialty Education Subcommittee at the Malaysian Medical Council since 2020. He was also a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for Health Technologies Economic Evaluation, Ministry of Health Malaysia, from 2017 to 2024. He had previously chaired the Malaysian National Conjoint Committee for Public Health Postgraduate Medical Program and the Public Health Society of the Malaysian Medical Association.   Dr Rampal heads the Western Pacific Regional Training Centre of the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases(TDR). He is also an advisory member of the Global Health Program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities and an international advisory committee member of the ASEAN University Network Health Promotion Network. He is also a member of the International Epidemiology Association and a past member of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association and the Society for Epidemiologic Research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Rampal improved the prevention and control of COVID-19 through active research and translation. He had actively communicated with the public through the media on COVID-19 issues. He was a member of the following committees: 1) Science and Technology Expert Panel for Disaster Risk Reduction under the Health and Emerging Threat Cluster of the Malaysia Disaster Management Agency; 2) National COVID-19 Epidemiological Analysis Task Force under the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation; 3) AFC Covid-19 Advisory Expert Group; 4) UMMC COVID-19 Task Force; and 5) the Journal of Global Health Science Commission on COVID-19 Response.

Dr. Pauline Yeoh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. She earned her Doctoral Degree through the Fast Track PhD program, Graduate On Time with Distinction for Thesis. Registered as a Graduate Engineer with the Board of Engineers Malaysia, Dr. Yeoh is passionate about advancing digital health and strives to bridge the gap between engineering and medicine through innovative research in computational intelligence for healthcare applications. Her research involvement spans national, industrial, and international collaborations, including participation in the China–Malaysia ‘AI+’ New Materials Joint Laboratory between Universiti Malaya and Peking University. During her PhD, she was selected as one of only 30 participants for the Association of Commonwealth Universities Summer School 2022 and served as a visiting PhD student at Xuzhou Medical University, China. She actively fosters global academic engagement and multidisciplinary research dialogues.