Dr Tommy Lam received his BSc (Bioinformatics) and PhD (Molecular Virology) in The University of Hong Kong, and had postdoctoral training in Pennsylvania State University and University of Oxford. His main research interest is the evolution, epidemiology and ecology of infectious diseases. He uses integrative genomic approach to determine the patterns, drivers and mechanisms of the emergence of pathogens at human-animal interface including influenza viruses and coronaviruses, as well as some bacterial pathogens and their antibiotic resistance emergence. His research has contributed to important understanding of the origins, evolution and transmission of newly emerging pathogens such as H7N9 influenza (Nature 2013, Nature 2015), MERS coronavirus (EID2013, Science 2016) and COVID-19 coronavirus (Nature 2020). He is also leading research studies on mosquitoes and their arboviruses in Hong Kong. Dr Lam is interested in bioinformatics methods. He is leading the development of several computational tools and databases for the genomic analysis.

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Dr Lam received Novartis Vaccines Award for Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases from International Society for Infectious Diseases in 2008, and the Newton Research Fellowship from Royal Society UK in 2010. He received National Science and Technology Progress Award (Special Award, 2017) from State Council of the People’s Republic of China. He has been ranked top 1% scholars at HKU based on Essential Science Indicators between 2016-2020. He was awarded with The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macau) in 2019.

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In addition to the teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the University, Dr Lam also taught in several international workshops and online courses. He organised the Croucher Summer Course: Computational Genomics of Viral Evolution and Epidemiology to promote high-quality technical training and research collaboration among the local and international scientists in this field.