Joseph Wu
Professor, University of Hong Kong
Wed
,
Jul 22, 2026
11:00 am
EST
Jul 22, 2026
11:00 am
In-person
Portsoken Street
London, E1 8PH, UK
London, E1 8PH, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Rm 140, 3rd Floor, 101 Blvd
Talk recording
Vaccine hesitancy is a dynamic global health challenge that shapes future pandemics by influencing the timing, distribution, and level of vaccine uptake. Trust, risk perception, access barriers, misinformation, and public narratives can shift willingness to vaccinate rapidly and unevenly. Yet epidemic models often treat uptake as fixed or exogenous, limiting their ability to capture how changing sentiment alters epidemic trajectories. This talk argues for a dual strategy: building trust in peacetime through transparent communication, safety monitoring, and community engagement; and nowcasting vaccine confidence during crises so that public health strategies and models can adapt in near real time and more accurately predict vaccine impact.
About the speaker
Joseph Wu is the Sir Robert Kotewall Professor in Public Health at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). He specialises in the mathematical and statistical modelling of diseases, aiming to develop practical analytics and strategies for disease control and prevention. His current research focuses on AI tools for global and personal health protection, particularly in clinical natural language processing, epidemic nowcasting and forecasting, and vaccine hesitancy.
Professor Wu has worked on COVID-19, seasonal and pandemic influenza, hand, foot and mouth disease, HPV, MERS, yellow fever, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer, and breast cancer. He earned his PhD in Operations Research and his BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT. He is the workstream modeling lead at the Hong Kong Jockey Club Global Health Institute, a tripartite collaboration between The University of Hong Kong, the University of Cambridge, and the International Vaccine Institute.
Professor Wu directed HKU’s first Massive Open Online Course, Epidemics, which has enrolled more than 50,000 learners since its launch in 2014. He is the director of two Croucher Summer Courses, on Vaccinology and Vaccine Hesitancy; Co-Editor-in-Chief of Epidemics; and an Associate Editor of PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. He is a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health and served as a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Immunization and Vaccine-related Implementation Research from 2018 to 2023.
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