Dr. Isaac Chun-Hai Fung is a digital health expert and an infectious disease epidemiologist. He analyses social media data for public health surveillance and health communication and uses digital technologies for public health interventions. He investigates the transmission of communicable diseases with a focus on respiratory infections and environmentally transmitted infections. He applied a variety of methods, from classical statistical methods to machine learning and mathematical modeling, to address public health problems and to provide solutions to policy-makers. He is especially interested in assisting public health agencies in their responses to public health emergencies. He is currently a guest researcher with the Health Economics and Modeling Unit, Division of Preparedness and Emerging Infections, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Examples of his recent projects include: Surveillance of unplanned school closures through social media platforms, Analysis of social media posts pertinent to public health emergencies, such as Ebola, MERS and Zika.

Dr. Fung was a Prevention Effectiveness Fellow at the CDC (2011-13) and a postdoc at the University of Georgia Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (2009-11). He earned his PhD from the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London, and his MSc in Control of Infectious Diseases from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was a graduate of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge.

Disciplines: Epidemiology

Teaching Interests: Epidemiology of Infectious diseases; mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission dynamics; social network analysis; social media data analysis