Rate My Professor Lei Zhang

Professor Lei Zhang is a Professor (Research) at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre in the School of Translational Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University. He heads the Artificial Intelligence and Modelling in Epidemiology Program. His academic background includes a Bachelor of Advanced Science in Mathematics and a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics from the University of Sydney (2001 and 2003, respectively), a PhD in Medicine from the University of New South Wales focusing on HIV pathology (2006), and a Master of Public Health from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (2009). Professionally, he held a postdoctoral position in bioinformatics at Humboldt University, Berlin (2006-2009), served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the Kirby Institute, UNSW (2009-2015), was appointed Associate Professor at Monash University's School of Translational Medicine in 2015, and promoted to Professor in 2022. He maintains external roles including Senior Visiting Scholar at UNSW, Technical Consultant for WHO Western Pacific Region since 2014, and has consulted for the World Bank and Harm Reduction International.

Prof Zhang's research specializations encompass epidemiology, HIV and sexually transmitted infections, health economics, mathematical modelling, machine learning, COVID-19, and diabetes. He is a cross-disciplinary expert in mathematics, artificial intelligence, statistical analysis, and computational research, with a focus on HIV/STI modelling. His work has shaped international HIV interventions via projects with UNAIDS, the World Bank, and WHO in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. He established the China-Australia Joint Research Center for Infectious Diseases with Xi'an Jiaotong University and has supervised six PhD students and 15 Master's students to completion. Prof Zhang has produced 266 publications, including 251 papers and six book chapters in prestigious journals such as The Lancet HIV, The Lancet Global Health, PNAS, and Journal of Infectious Diseases, amassing over 12,500 citations. Key publications include 'Characteristics Analysis and Implications on the COVID-19 Reopening of Victoria, Australia' (2020), 'Population genomic screening of all young adults in a health-care system: a cost-effectiveness analysis' (2019), and recent AI-focused works like 'Controllable Skin Synthesis via Lesion-Focused Vector Autoregression Model' (2026) and 'A cross population study of retinal aging biomarkers' (2025). He received the 2021 Australasian Sexual and Reproductive Health Alliance Innovation Award and the 2025 ATSE Clunies Ross Technology Innovation Award for AI-assisted STI research.