Prof Brian Hall from the University of Macau’s (UM) Faculty of Social Sciences received an Excellence in Advising Award from the Center for Global Health of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHBSPH). According to the JHBSPH’s website: candidates for this award are nominated by the students, and recipients are recognised ‘for their passion, dedication, and expertise in guiding students through global health research’. The JHBSPH has been consistently ranked as the No 1 public health school in the United States and among the best in the world.

One student nominator is quoted as saying ‘It’s one thing to be working on a project as a research assistant, but another to be mentored and supported throughout the research process by someone who lives and breathes this work, someone who believes wholeheartedly in its potential for truly positive change in the community – one of the many driving forces behind his success.’

After joining UM, Prof Hall founded the university’s first research group focused on public and global health. His groundbreaking work on migrants in Macao and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has led to longstanding collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) on using the digital health approach to improve population wellbeing. His students have been accepted in public health programmes at various leading schools of public health, including the Colombia University, the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Taiwan University, and Johns Hopkins University.

Prof Hall completed his fellowship in epidemiology at the JHBSPH. His global health fellowship in HIV and infectious disease epidemiology was sponsored by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health of the United States, and jointly hosted by the University of North Carolina Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, Sun Yat-Sen University’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the JHBSPH. Prof Hall was the inaugural fellow in global mental health of the WHO. He is currently an international fellow of the Chinese Academies of Sciences and the Key State Laboratory in Mental Health (Beijing) and a visiting associate professor in the JHBSPH Department of Health, Behavior, and Society , where he has held a faculty appointment since 2014. To learn more about Prof Hall’s research group, please visit www.um-gmh.com.