Thinh Ong is a preventive medicine doctor and an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit, Vietnam. His work connects epidemic analytics with practical public health policy.

His contributions fall into three areas:

– Surveillance and outbreak response: he has alerted government agencies to critical immunity gaps ahead of a major measles epidemic, guided the integration of the effective reproduction number and epidemic thresholds into local surveillance frameworks, and advised Ho Chi Minh City CDC on using modelling to inform policy for measles and hand-foot-mouth disease.

– Software development: he developed denim, a C++-based R package for compartmental models with flexible dwell-time distributions, and serosv, a tool for analysing serological survey data with serocatalytic models.

– Capacity building: grounded in both medical practice and mathematical modelling, he is well placed to build research capacity within the medical community. He has delivered courses on R programming, statistical modelling, and infectious disease dynamics for local CDCs, mentored public health staff and clinicians across internal medicine, surgery, and reproductive health, guiding several from study design through to publication in high-impact journals.

His work aims to give Vietnamese policymakers data-driven evidence, and to build a stronger community of clinicians and public health practitioners engaged in research.