Dr Maggie Kwok joined the School of Public Health as a research assistant and earned her Ph.D. degree in Public Health from the University of Hong Kong. She was on the Takemi Fellowship Program in International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2014-15 and was on the Health and Medical Research Fund fellowship training at the Stanford University in 2017-2018.

Dr Kwok is focusing on developing new interventions to prevent non-communicable diseases and promote health equity. Building on several, large, on-going Hong Kong Chinese cohorts (the “Children of 1997” birth cohort, the FAMILY cohort and the Elderly Health Service cohort), Dr Kwok is exploiting differences between East and West to gain new insights about health, as well as considering how Hong Kong can act as a sentinel for other rapidly developing Chinese mega-cities.

Dr Kwok has generated new information about key public health issues, such as the role of breastfeeding and second-hand smoke exposure in child health. She is now using new methods to verify previous findings concerning the long-term effects of breastfeeding.

Dr Kwok is also interested more broadly in unravelling the links between early life exposures and adult health, informed by insights from evolutionary biology theory. Specifically, she has investigated secular trends in blood pressure and body mass index. She has examined the contribution of different growth patterns to adolescent blood pressure and body mass index. She has also examined the role of social determinants of health. Finally, she is interested in the interplay between physical and mental health, so as to identify which is the most effective target of intervention.

She is one of the coordinators of CMED 6207: Non-communicable disease epidemiology and control of the School’s Master of Public Health programme and the tutor of Interdisciplinary Health Research Project of the Faculty’s undergraduate curriculum.