. Dr. Mohammad Ali, Senior Scientist, International Vaccine Institute, Seoul, Korea; and, adjunct Professor at the Seoul National University, Korea. Dr. Ali’s interests include geographic analysis of health, health interventions, population and human ecology. He uses GIS, remote sensing, and spatial modeling to investigate, among other things, the emergence and fluctuations of cholera and variations in vaccine distribution.
Dr. Mohammad Ali received his BA and MA in economics at Rajshahi University, Bangladesh, in the Mid-1970s. He first became interested in geographical epidemiology while working at the Centre for Health and Population Research, Bangladesh in the mid 1980s. This led to his enrolment in the Ph.D. program in medical geography at the University of Liege, which he completed in 2000.
He presently works as a senior scientist in the International Vaccine Institute, based in Seoul, Korea. The Institute’s mission is to introduce new and improved vaccines in developing countries at an affordable cost. In 2001, Dr. Ali introduced GIS into vaccine evaluation studies in China, Vietnam, Pakistan, and India. Lately, his research investigates evaluation of herd immunity, local-level effectiveness of cholera vaccines disease mapping, and ecological links to spatial variations of diseases. A wide range of vaccine trials are put in place before they are introduced into public health distribution. Geographic analysis of vaccine efficacy contributes to the interpretion of these experiments. Neighborhood level studies are sometimes essential to identify important public health problems and to generate hypotheses about their potential causes. His innovative approach to measurement of vaccine herd effects using GIS has forged a new direction for vaccine evaluation.
Dr. Ali has published numerous papers and book chapters; journals include Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Social Science Medicine, Health Place, International Journal of Health Geographics, and Bulletin of the WHO, among others.
Mohammad may be contacted at mali@IVI.INT.
Updated: February 2011
Health and Medical Geography 