Professor Adeeba Kamarulzaman graduated from Monash University in 1987 and trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the Monash Medical Centre and Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. She is presently the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Yale University, USA. She established the Centre of Excellence for Research on AIDS (CERiA) that conducts multi-disciplinary research on HIV ranging from clinical to public health and policy research. Professor Kamarulzaman has used her clinical and academic leadership to engage in the national and community response to HIV/AIDS. She is currently Chairman of the Malaysian AIDS Foundation and an Executive Council member of the Malaysian AIDS Council, the peak HIV NGO in Malaysia. At the international level, Professor Kamarulzaman is presently an Executive Council Member of the International AIDS Society and a member of the UNAIDS Scientific Expert Panel on HIV. She has also been an advisor to numerous WHO committees on HIV/AIDS. She has played a key role in the establishment and ongoing activities and collaborations of a regional HIV research network initiative; TREAT Asia. Her achievements have been recognised through several national and international awards including the Tun Mahathir Science and the Merdeka Awards for her role as a member of the University of Malaya’s Nipah Investigative Team. She is the first recipient of the Advance Australia Global Award in the category of Alumni in 2012 and in April 2015 she was honoured with a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) from her alma mater, Monash University. She also has the distinct honour of having been featured in both The Lancet and Science publications in 2013 and 2014 respectively.  

Hesham Al-Mekhlafi has a PhD in public health (2008), master’s degrees in medical science (parasitology) (2004) and in applied statistics (2012) as well as a bachelor’s degree in medical laboratories (1997). Since early 2000s, he has been actively engaged in research on the molecular epidemiology and prevention of infectious diseases including malaria, neglected tropical diseases, NTDs (such as soil-transmitted helminthiasis, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis and dengue fever), and waterborne parasites. He joined the department of parasitology, University of Malaya (a regional leading dept. in parasitology research) for seven years (2009–2016) as a senior lecturer and promoted to associate professor. In 2016, he joined Jazan University, Saudi Arabia and promoted to full professor in 2022. He re-joined Universiti Malaya in 2023. He has taught several courses in parasitology, epidemiology, biostatistics, and research methodology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He has established passionate research teams that involved diligent postgraduate students, enthusiastic colleagues, and inspiring national and international collaborators. The research dedicated to helping vulnerable rural and aboriginal communities in Malaysia and other countries including Yemen, Nigeria and Libya against the NTDs, malaria and other infectious diseases. He has published more than 150 articles in high-impact ISI & Scopus indexed journals; with h-index of 41 (WoS). Hesham has been a member of several academic, scientific and administrative councils and committees. He also enjoys reviewing scientific manuscripts, research proposals, plans and strategies, theses and reports, etc. He is a member of the editorial boards of several renowned journals, and a regular reviewer for many peer-reviewed journals as well as a panel member of assessors for various national and international research grant schemes and postgraduate programs.

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.