Dr. Francisco Lai is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed by the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy and the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Care, HKUMed. He obtained his B.Sc. degree in economics and finance from HKUST Business School in 2013 (graduating with Dean’s Award in Social Science) and his Ph.D. degree in public health from CUHK Medicine in 2019. He received the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship (for Postgraduate Students) 2018/19 in recognition of the potential societal significance of his Ph.D. research and was awarded the RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020/21, inaugural exercise) in support of his postdoctoral training at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He joined the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in March 2021 as a Research Assistant Professor and was promoted to Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in September 2023.

Francisco is a big-data epidemiologist focused on the double burdens of infectious and non-communicable diseases as well as physical and mental disorders, i.e., multimorbidity. He led research published in high-impact journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Nature Communications, and Canadian Medical Association Journal. He has published more than 100 scholarly journal articles, with an H-Index of 23 (Google Scholar, as of Sep 2023). His research has been shortlisted for the HKU Research Output Prize multiple times since 2022, and the societal impact of his works on vaccine safety and pharmacovigilance during the COVID-19 pandemic has also been recognized by the HKU Knowledge Exchange Award in 2023.

The team is actively recruiting motivated PhD students or research assistants. Interested students can email fttlai@hku.hk their CV and samples of publications for Francisco’s consideration.

Picture: Francisco being interviewed on his pharmacoepidemiologic research on COVID-19 vaccines in 時事全方位 (Now新聞), a televised program on Now TV on August 31, 2022 (Source: https://news.now.com/home/local/player?newsId=488573&utm_source=nowNewsAppShare&utm_medium=referral)

Picture: Francisco and his research assistants and students