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Deputy Director (Laboratory Network Capacity and Readiness), Communicable Diseases Agency

Pang Qing Yuan is a public health and emergency management specialist with over 14 years of experience spanning emergency response, epidemiology, and global health security. Currently he is overseeing the newly formed unit in Communicable Diseases Agency, National Public Health Laboratory. The unit is tasked with developing laboratory network strategy in anticipation of a response to the next pandemic.

His career has taken him across Southeast Asia and beyond, including field deployments to Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Myanmar and Bangladesh, where he served as an epidemiologist during the Rohingya refugee crisis. He has managed emergency operations centre and worked extensively on information management during major natural disasters including Typhoon Damrey 2018, the Lombok and Central Sulawesi earthquakes 2019, and Super Typhoon Mangkhut 2019.

Qing Yuan previously worked with the WHO HQ on developing risk assessment tools for Member States, prior to that he was working in WHO Cambodia Country office with the WHO Health Emergencies Team responding to infectious hazards such as Avian Influenza. Other stints included working with Robert Koch Institute in Germany developing health emergency operations centre capacity building programme for WHO SEARO, and served as Assistant Director at the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA Centre) in Jakarta, Indonesia. His civil service included roles at the Ministry of Health’s Communicable Diseases Division and the Ministry of National Development’s Emergency Preparedness unit.

He holds an MSc in Crisis and Disaster Management with Distinction from the University of Portsmouth and a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from Nanyang Technological University. His expertise encompasses emergency operations centre management, epidemiological surveillance and disease outbreak control, risk assessment, and humanitarian response coordination.

Publications

• ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre). (2018). ASEAN Risk Monitor and Disaster Management Review (ARMOR). https://ahacentre.org/armor
• Jeffries, R., Abdi, H., Ali, M., Bhuiyan, A. T. M. R. H., El Shazly, M., et al. (2021). The health response to the Rohingya refugee crisis post August 2017: Reflections from two years of health sector coordination in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. PLOS ONE, 16(6), e0253013. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253013
• Raj, P., Tay, J., Ang, L. W., et al. (2017). A large common-source outbreak of norovirus gastroenteritis in a hotel in Singapore, 2012. Epidemiology and Infection, 145(3), 535–544. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095026881600248X