Simon I Hay

Simon I. Hay, BSc, DPhil, DSc, is a Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington and Director of Geospatial Science at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). His career has focused on spatial and temporal aspects of infectious disease epidemiology to support the more rational implementation of disease control and intervention strategies. He now leads an international collaboration of researchers, from a wide variety of academic disciplines, with the objective of improving the outputs and outcomes of infectious disease cartography.

His best-known work is focused on accurately defining human populations at risk of malaria and its burden at global, regional, and national scales, through the co-founding of the Malaria Atlas Project. He has also chaired a similar European Union-funded initiative for dengue. Most recently at IHME, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he has embarked on an ambitious new project to expand these techniques to a much wider range of diseases of the tropics and ultimately harmonize this mapping with the global burden of disease effort.

Prof. Hay obtained his doctorates from the University of Oxford, where he remains a member of congregation, a Research Fellow in the Sciences and Mathematics at St John's College, and a Professor of Epidemiology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed and other contributions, including two research monographs; these are cited collectively more than 3,000 times each year, leading to an h-index of >75 and >20,000 lifetime citations.

Prof. Hay was awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London (2008) and the Back Award of the Royal Geographical Society (2012) for research contributing to public health policy. He has also been awarded the Bailey K. Ashford Medal of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2013) and the Chalmers Memorial Medal (2015) of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, both for exceptional contributions to tropical medicine.

Prof. Hay has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and served as its 52nd President (2013-2015). He has also been elected to the fellowship of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (FASTMH), the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (FRCP Edin), and the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci).

IHME was established at the University of Washington in 2007. Its mission is to improve health through better health evidence.