Emily Ying Yang Chan


Emily Ying Yang Chan is a humanitarian doctor and public health academic based in Hong Kong, China. She is the Assistant Dean and Professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Medicine, Head of the Division of Global Health and Humanitarian Medicine at the Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care, Director at the Centre for Global Health, Director of the Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response, Director of the Centre of Excellence of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk, Visiting Professor of Public Health Medicine at the Oxford University Nuffield Department of Medicine, Fellow at Harvard University FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Honorary Professor at University of Hong Kong Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, and Fellow at Hong Kong Academy of Medicine. She was appointed CEO of the GX Foundation in 2019.

Academic and medical training

She received her academic training from Johns Hopkins University, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Research and experience

Her research interests include climate change and health, health and environmental co-benefits, disaster and humanitarian medicine, global and planetary health, violence and injury epidemiology, healthy settings, health needs and programme impact evaluation, evidence-based medical and public health interventions in resource deficit settings.
She has been involved in professional technical public health specialist training programmes of the Hong Kong SAR Government, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Health Emergency Response Office of China's National Health and Family Planning Commission. In addition, through the CCOUC China Ethnic Minority Health Project she established in 2009, her team has outreached more than 18,000 villagers in 49 remote, disaster-prone, resource-deficit rural settings in 11 provinces in China and trained about 700 students and scholars from CUHK, HKU, Oxford University and Harvard University. Professor Chan has also established research and training projects in Bhutan and Nepal. Moreover, the international online course "Public Health Principles in Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response" developed by her team to examine the application of public health principles in planning and responding to disaster and humanitarian crises has more than 8,000 students enrolled from six continents since its launch in May 2014. Another two international online courses "Climate Change and Health" and "Research Methodology for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response" by her team have also been launched.
Emily Chan is also a Co-chairperson of the World Health Organization Thematic Platform for Health Emergency & Disaster Risk Management Research Network, a Co-chairperson of the World Health Organization COVID-19 Research Roadmap Social Science working group, a member of the Asia Science Technology and Academia Advisory Group of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and a member of the Third China Committee for Integrated Research on Disaster Risk, and serves in various technical consultation capacities for World Health Organization. She has extensive experience in serving as frontline emergency relief practitioner in the mid-1990s that spans across 20 countries.

Public services

Emily Chan was awarded the 2007 Nobuo Maeda International Research Award of the American Public Health Association and has published more than 200 international peer-reviewed academic/technical/conference articles and seven of these appeared in The Lancet and Bulletin of the World Health Organization. Her community public health resilience and disaster-health related papers have been used as policy references within the WHO and the Health Emergency Response Office of China's National Health and Family Planning Commission. She has also received the Hong Kong Ten Outstanding Young Persons Award in 2004, Caring Physicians of the World Award in 2005, Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World Award in 2005, Hong Kong Humanity Award in 2007, 2015 Leader of the Year Award in 2016, the National Geographic Chinese Explorer Award from the National Geographic Magazine, the 2017 UGC Teaching Award by the , a second prize in the 2018 National Teaching Achievement Award from the Ministry of Education, PRC, and nominee of the biennial United Nations Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction in 2019.

Publications

Peer-review journal publications

Human health security