Balbir Singh
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia
Professor Balbir Singh, Senior Principal Fellow and the founding director of the Malaria Research Centre at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), obtained his BSc, MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Liverpool, UK. From 1984-1991 he worked as a Postdoctoral Scientist and as a Beit Medical Fellow on falciparum malaria at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, with working stints in Malawi and Thailand. His research on malaria continued at Universiti Sains Malaysia and at UNIMAS, where his research team made several key discoveries demonstrating that the simian malaria parasite, Plasmodium knowlesi, is a significant cause of life-threatening zoonotic malaria in Southeast Asia. His research has been funded by international funding agencies, including the Wellcome Trust, and he has published in leading journals such as The Lancet, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, PNAS and Emerging Infectious Diseases. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and was the local secretary for Malaysia from 1994 to 2007 for the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. His research on zoonotic malaria is internationally recognised and he has served as a commissioner for The Lancet Commission on Malaria Eradication and twice as an advisor to the World Health Organisation.