Profile

Professor Dr. Yvonne Lim Ai Lian is currently the Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and International), Universiti Malaya, Senior Professor at the Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine and a University Senate Member. She is a fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia, the co-chair of the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Programme and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities.

Prior to this, she has taken on university and national leadership roles as the Deputy Dean (Research) at the Faculty of Medicine, Director of International Relations Office and Associate Vice Chancellor of Global Engagement, Universiti Malaya. She was also the former President of the Malaysian Society of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine and former Council Member of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia. 

Her research focuses on host-parasite-environment interactions among underserved indigenous communities from a range of socioeconomic, ecological and urbanisation gradient. She has been studying infectious diseases among the Orang Asli (indigenous) populations of Peninsular Malaysia for close to three decades. Her involvement in shaping national policies, including the National Policy for the Development of Orang Asli (Indigenous), underscores her commitment to community welfare.

In recent decade, her team’s work with collaborators from New York University unravelled the mechanisms of how low levels of helminth (worm) infection promote growth of probiotic gut microbiota, which was published in Science 2016. The gut microbiome work has also expanded to among HIV and cancer patients. Recently, her collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA has not only delved deeper into the understanding of parasitic infections and gut microbiome but also into the association of skin infections with skin microbiome.

Her work has been funded by various national and international grants (eg. US NIHR01 grants). More recently, she was awarded the NIH Grant Number: 1R01AI183416-01 as a principal investigator. She has published more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 9 book chapters and 3 books. She has supervised to completion more than 40 postgraduate students and hosted researchers from a vast network of local and international partnerships (eg. US, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore). She was a visiting researcher at the Scottish Parasite Diagnostic and Reference Laboratory (formerly Scottish Parasite Diagnostic Laboratory), Glasgow, Scotland; a visiting fellow at the Department of Veterinary Science, University of Melbourne, Australia; a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA and the Department of Molecular Parasitology and Tropical Diseases, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan.

She has received numerous awards and recognitions, among which were the MSPTM Medal (2008) for being an outstanding young scientist; the Universiti Malaya Excellent Lecturer award for the Science Disciplines (2015); the Top Research Scientists of Malaysia Award (2016) and inducted as a Fellow of the eminent Academy of Sciences Malaysia (2017). She was cited by Stanford University as one of the top 2% scientists for the years 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2024 in her field of expertise. In 2021, she was awarded the Fulbright Scholar Award 2021/2022 for an attachment at the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA. She was awarded the Sandosham Gold Medal Award in 2024 which represents the highest work of distinction awarded by the Malaysian Society of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine to outstanding Scientists for their achievements in the field of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine.