Profile: Up close with with Assistant Professor Lim Jue Tao

By Kimberley Wang, Manager, Media and Publications, Communications and Outreach

In Singapore, where mosquitoes are active year-round, we are susceptible to diseases such as dengue that are transmitted through their bites. What is the risk and impact of mosquito-borne diseases? How do we determine the effectiveness of different interventions in the local and global context? These are the questions that Assistant Professor Lim Jue Tao is tackling in his role as an infectious disease epidemiologist. 

Appointed Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling at LKCMedicine last September, his research focuses on infectious disease modelling through the development of novel modelling tools to understand the transmission and epidemiology of such diseases, assessing and modelling the efficacy of potential clinical and public health interventions, and quantifying the cost effectiveness of these interventions. Having contributed to more than 40 publications in journals such as Lancet Infectious Diseases, he is also involved in multiple local and international collaborations.

Q: What sparked your interest in research? 

I had no interest in being a scientist until secondary school when I realised that math was quite fun, by helping you to characterise things that aren’t observed. For example, you can assess the effects of interventions even before doing a trial or observing other intervention effects in the real world. I found that extremely fascinating.

Q: What was the path that led you to specialise in infectious disease modelling?

I was always interested in healthcare. I was fascinated with how diseases spread. An opportunity came up when I was at the National University of Singapore while doing my masters in statistics. There was a job opening at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (SSHSPH) where I was tasked with forecasting the disease burdens of ageing communities. This was not related to infectious disease at all but it sparked my interest in modelling.

After that, there was an opening with my past supervisor [SSHSPH Vice-Dean of Research] Alex Cook’s laboratory that gave me a chance to work on dengue modelling. Moving there after my stint with elderly research stirred my passion and I could feel my true interest in the topic after working on it.

One other topic that I was interested in during my bachelor's degree was time series analysis – data which is time dependent. For infectious disease, the data sets are time dependent. For example, if you have more case counts of COVID-19 yesterday, it is likely that you will have more tomorrow. Combining these two – infectious disease and time series analysis – led to my great interest in this topic.

Q: It has been about five months since you joined LKCMedicine. Tell us more about your key research projects at the School.

The largest research theme that I have is vector-borne diseases – dengue and malaria. The first part is developing new tools to understand the risk factors for the transmission of these diseases. This is quite a difficult problem because it’s not like COVID-19, which is human to human. In this case, it’s human to vector to human. The transmission part is much more complex. 

The second part is applying these tools to estimate the risk factors in different contexts – the local setting in Singapore as well as the regional and global setting. The third part is once we understand these tools, what are potential ways we can intervene – modelling different types of interventions to mitigate different risk factors of the disease.

Q: On 13 February, Singapore moved from DORSCON Yellow to Green. In your opinion, is the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic truly behind us? 

If you look at the natural progression disease of most infectious diseases, pathogens usually mutate to a less severe form. If you look at the advent of the pandemic, we had a very fatal wild-type where the hospitalisation rate was extremely high. Following that, we had Omicron, which has less severe disease. Taking history as reference, we can expect that the worst of the pandemic is behind us but that doesn’t mean we stop the work on pandemic preparedness.

Q: How does your research contribute to pandemic preparedness?

In the past three years, I was actively involved in COVID-19 infectious disease modelling with my team at SSHSPH. At the start, it was understanding how we can generate potential interventions to mitigate disease spread. This includes how to develop and design lockdowns for minimising the impact of COVID-19 on Singapore and the region, and how to stop importation risk. After that, it was looking at what type of measures can be implemented in both the community and nosocomial setting. Then, how to design effective screening strategies to mitigate transmission.

One of the most interesting findings was how COVID-19 related measures influence the transmission of vector-borne disease. In Singapore, what we found was an increase in dengue transmission when people started to stay home, possibly due to increased interactions with mosquitoes. For the working adult, when you are in the office, you are in an air-conditioned setting and you usually don't interact with the day-biting Aedes aegpyti vector. During the lockdown, you are at home and in a well-ventilated setting, so there is an increase in the risk for you. We found that it was a contributive factor which led to the largest dengue epidemic on record in Singapore.

Q: Who are some of your mentors and how did they influence you in your career?

My PhD supervisor Alex is a very good mentor up to this day. He helped me understand from the start, how to have a successful PhD and career in science including the tenure track process and pain points that I would have faced as faculty.

In my time at the National Environment Agency’s Environmental Health Institute, my mentors were Lee Ching and Shuzhen. They helped me see how science can affect policy and to look at the bigger picture of the whole research and healthcare landscape. I think it’s very important that science is not just on the bench or the computer where you code, but rather, to see how the whole ecosystem ties together as well as how things might have policy relevance or real-world impact. They helped me understand how to translate my science for real-world use and impact communities.

The third would be the senior management in LKCMedicine who are very supportive of the tenure track faculty. My mentor Sanjay gave me very clear advice on what to focus on for the tenure track journey as well as being very frank about the process.

Q: What advice do you have for postdocs and early researchers who are starting out in their research career?

My advice would be for those in the computational or dry lab. Collaborate astutely, know who will benefit your research career. Be selective with collaborations but always be open to them. Multi-task, spend your time efficiently and be focused on what you want out of it – be results-oriented. 

Don’t be afraid to mentor people more junior than you. You never know, they can be helpful to you. You can create partnerships and significant collaborations.