Associate Professor Poh Lian Lim

Associate Professor Poh Lian Lim is the Director of the High-Level Isolation Unit, National Centre for Infectious Diseases and Head of the Travelers’ Health and Vaccination Clinic, Tan Tock Seng Hospital. She also serves as Senior Consultant with Ministry of Health, Singapore. She is a Singapore permanent resident, citizen of the United States of America and originally from Malaysia. 

Professor Lim is the current Vice-Chair of the Health-Security Interface Technical Advisory Group (2022–2024) (HSI-TAG), and was Chair for the HSI-TAG from 2019–2022. She served on WHO’s Global Outbreak and Response Network (GOARN) Steering Committee (2008–2018) and the UN Secretary General’s Global Health Crises Taskforce (2016–2017). She was Chair of the Independent Allocation of Vaccines Group for the COVAX Facility in 2022, and actively involved in Singapore’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout on the Expert Committee on COVID-19 Vaccination (EC19V). She served on WHO expert groups for the Horizon Scan on Emerging Technologies, Global Governance for Responsible Use of Life Sciences and the Smallpox Vaccine Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) working group.

Dr Lim is an active clinician, medical educator and public health physician. She studied biochemistry at Harvard, medicine at Columbia and public health at Tulane. She was a frontline infectious disease physician during the SARS outbreak in 2003 and reported the first laboratory-acquired SARS case in the New England Journal of Medicine. She served as Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (2012–2016), helped establish Singapore’s national antimicrobial resistance surveillance and stewardship framework, spent a decade in HIV clinical trials, was Chair of the TREAT Asia Steering Committee (2008–2010), and Principal Investigator for the GeoSentinel travel medicine surveillance site in Singapore (2006–2018). Her extensive work in public health, outbreak response, emerging and novel pathogens, travel medicine and vaccines led to her being honored with the Minster of Health Award in 2018 and the National Outstanding Clinician Award in 2022.