Dr. Isaac Chun-Hai Fung is an infectious disease epidemiologist with experience in mathematical modeling, data analysis, and digital health. 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.

 

Epidemiology of respiratory infections. Since 2020, Dr. Fung established his expertise in COVID-19 epidemiology, focusing on the estimation of SARS-CoV-2 transmission potential and the effects of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). In April 2020, his team published 2 papers: (1) COVID-19 epidemic doubling time in China, and (2) COVID-19 reproduction number in Iran. Dr. Fung extended the epidemic doubling time analysis to China's prefecture level. Since then, Dr. Fung and his students completed a series of US/Canada state/province-level analysis of COVID-19 time-varying reproduction number (Rt) and the effect of NPIs.

Digital health. From 2013 to 2019, Dr. Fung's prior research focus was social media data analysis for public health surveillance and health communication and the applications of digital technologies for public health interventions.  Examples of his digital health projects included: Surveillance of unplanned school closures through social media platforms, and analysis of social media posts pertinent to public health emergencies, such as Ebola, MERS and Zika. 

Academic training. Prior to his Georgia Southern's faculty appointment, Dr. Fung was a Prevention Effectiveness Fellow at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (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 graduated from Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge (Natural Sciences - Biological Science).

 

Discipline: Epidemiology

Teaching Interests: Epidemiology of Infectious diseases; mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission dynamics