Professor, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore

• Speaker, Global Health Symposium, 17 Sep 2021    

Prof Wang Linfa is a Professor for the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore.

His research focuses on emerging viruses. He played a leading role in identifying bats as the natural host of SARS-CoV. His research extended from bat-borne viruses to better understand virus-bat interaction and led an international team to carry out comparative genomic analysis of two bat species. The team discovered an important link between adaptation to flight and the bat's ability to counter DNA damage repair as a result of fast metabolism and to co-exist with a large number of viruses without developing clinical diseases.

Prof Wang's work has been recognised internationally through various international awards, numerous invited speeches at major international conferences and many top scientific publications including papers in Science, Nature, and Lancet.  In 2010, he was elected to the Australia Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. In 2021, he was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology.

Prof Wang currently serves on multiple WHO COVID-19 Committees to discuss and provide his expertise for the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.  He is also involved in several international work groups on the development of diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics against COVID-19.