Professor Simon Iain Hay - Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington

BSc, DPhil, DSc, FRCP (Edin), FRSA, FLS, FRGS, FASTMH, FMedSci, FRSPSoc, CBiol FRSB

Simon I. Hay, DPhil, DSc, FMedSci is a Professor in the Department of Health Metrics Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington, and Director of the Local Burden of Disease (LBD) group at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). His career has focused on spatial and temporal aspects of infectious disease epidemiology to support the more rational implementation of disease control. He now leads the LBD group, an international collaboration of researchers from a wide variety of academic disciplines, with the objective of improving the outputs and outcomes of infectious disease cartography.

 

Prof. Hay’s best known work is centred on accurately defining human populations at risk of malaria and its burden at global, regional and national scales, through the co-founding of the Malaria Atlas Project. Most recently at IHME, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he has embarked on a project to expand these techniques to a much wider range of diseases of the tropics and ultimately harmonize this mapping with the IHME global burden of disease effort.

Prof. Hay obtained his doctorates from the University of Oxford where he remains a member of congregation. He has published >400 peer-reviewed and other contributions, including two research monographs; these are cited collectively more than 14,000 times each year, leading to an h-index of >130 and >81,000 lifetime citations.

 

Prof. Hay was awarded the Scientific Medal (2008) of the Zoological Society of London and the Back Award (2012) of the Royal Geographical Society for research contributing to public health policy. He has also been awarded the Bailey K. Ashford Medal (2013) of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) and the Chalmers Memorial Medal (2015) of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (RSTMH), both for exceptional contributions to tropical medicine.

 

Recently, Prof. Hay received a Recognizing Excellence Around Champions of Health (REACH) Game Changing Innovator Award Honorary Mention (2019). The REACH Awards recognize those who have demonstrated extraordinary leadership and commitment in the field of disease elimination. He also received the “10 to End” innovator prize from Malaria No More (2019). The prize is presented for innovation helping to make the end of malaria possible in our lifetimes.

 

Prof. Hay has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the RSTMH and served as its 52nd President (2013-2015). He has also been elected to the fellowship of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (FASTMH), the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (FRCP Edin) and the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci).