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MORU. Photographer_Yvan Cohen
Tell us about your research or area of work.
I am a bioethicist and Professor of Global Health at the University of Oxford, based in Bangkok, Thailand. My research interests include ethics in research conducted in low-resource settings, data ethics, community engagement, and the ethics of antimicrobial resistance.
My work involves working directly with communities, including those traditionally underserved by research for reasons beyond their control. My team coordinates a network of community advisory boards (CABs) in Southeast Asia. Through these CABs and other community engagement initiatives, we learn what research is needed to improve the health of these communities.
My work also focuses on research about how to conduct research in the most ethical way. Research ethics guidelines are often developed in high-income Western settings, which means they are typically shaped by the social, cultural, legal, and institutional realities of those contexts and may not fully account for the resource constraints, community structures, and lived experiences in low-resourced countries. A key part of my work involves translating these guidelines through research with relevant communities so that they are relevant, practical, and appropriate in our context - in Southeast Asia and other low-resource settings.
How did you become a Professor at Oxford?
I started at the University of Oxford exactly 20 years ago, on 6th March, as a Research Support Associate in Research Services. I had learned about research and drug development during my pharmacy undergraduate studies and then coordinated a trial on chronic prostatitis in Malaysia as part of my PhD. I then worked for Abbott Laboratories, Malaysia, as a Clinical Research Associate where I coordinated clinical trials. In 2008, I moved to MORU to head a new team, the Clinical Trials Support Group, where I provided support to researchers running clinical trials in tropical medicine, such as in the field of malaria.
This role, which I held for seven years, included ethics and engagement support for clinical trials. At MORU, this is particularly important because we often work with communities that are poor, have limited access to healthcare and may be vulnerable to exploitation, such as migrants and ethnic minority groups. Research in these settings is often fraught with ethical challenges, including issues around consent.
I became so passionate about these issues that they developed into my main area of academic interest. I subsequently obtained grants and established a new team called Bioethics and Engagement. I then went on to complete a Master’s degree in Bioethics, which provided the theoretical foundation for my work, as my Bachelor’s degree and PhD were in Pharmacy.
What does your day-to-day work look like now?
My day-to-day work is a combination of supervising DPhil students, attending meetings, administrative work, and working with my team, who are based at MORU sites across Southeast Asia. Our administrative hub is in Bangkok, but we have research sites on the Thai-Myanmar border, in northern Thailand, and in northeastern Cambodia.
What challenges or setbacks have you encountered along the way?
Getting a place at a public university for undergraduate studies in Malaysia was very competitive. At the time I was applying there were only five public universities for a population of ~25 million people. It was even more competitive to secure a place in biomedical courses such as medicine and pharmacy. At that time, Universiti Sains Malaysia was the only university in Malaysia that offered a degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences.
My parents could not afford to pay for an overseas education, so gaining admission to a local university was especially important and fortunately I was awarded a scholarship.
Move forward to my work now, and Bioethics and engagement is a relatively new academic field in Southeast Asia; MORU is the first organisation in the region to invest in this field of research and it's been a lot of work but we now have a thriving programme. I hope to inspire other academic teams to establish similar areas of research. Whilst my work focuses on tropical diseases, the same approach could be applied to research in cancer, non-communicable diseases, and mental health.
Looking back, what advice would you have given your younger self?
That dreaming big is OK.
I was born and raised in Penang, an island in the northwestern part of Malaysia, and completed my Bachelor of Pharmacy and PhD in Malaysia. Moving to the United Kingdom to take up a new position at the University of Oxford was daunting. It was a big step.
When I was appointed Professor at the University of Oxford, there was considerable excitement in the media and in my hometown - it was a very big deal. Reporters contacted not only me, but also my mother! Friends from my alma mater, Universiti Sains Malaysia, reached out to congratulate me, and there were also official congratulatory messages on social media, including remarks from the Palace of Malaysia.
Some links to pieces in the media from that time show the excitement around my Professorship and what it meant to our community.