Center for
Global Health

International Scholar

Languages: English (professional), Vietnamese (Native), Mandarin (Intermediate)

BIO STATEMENT

Dr. Quan is a Research Fellow at the College of Health Sciences, VinUniversity (Vietnam), trained as a physician (MD), then earned an MPH in epidemiology and biostatistics from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (supervisor: Professor David Dowdy). His research applies rigorous epidemiologic methods, disease modeling, and data analytics to address infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and global health challenges in resource-limited settings; with a particular focus on dengue, arboviruses, and the social and environmental determinants that shape disease transmission and health outcomes.

His recent work, published in Nature Communications, examines how Vietnam's fifty-year socioeconomic transformation has created a "paradox of progress" in which development simultaneously alleviates diseases of poverty while generating new infectious disease vulnerabilities linked to urbanization, inequality, and climate change. In his current role, Dr. Quan works across EMR-based cohorts, Global Burden of Disease analyses, disease modeling and forecasting, and evidence synthesis to generate policy-relevant insights that inform health systems and decision-making in Vietnam and globally. He is also a contributor of Hadley Wickham's R for Data Science (R4DS) project, providing the official Vietnamese translation for the book (https://vn.r4ds.hadley.nz/), reflecting his commitment to R programming, open-source education, and building analytical capacity in the Vietnamese-language research community.

Recent Global Health Projects

EHR-based population health and disease burden research (VinCohort, Vietnam)

Dr. Quan is a member of VinCohort (Professor Le Cu Linh), a longitudinal EHR cohort of hundreds of thousands of health-check records and nationally representative survey data (WHO STEPS) to quantify NCDs burden in Vietnam. His work targets MASLD and the "lean MASLD" phenotype: metabolically significant hepatic steatosis and visceral adiposity occurring at BMI levels that Western cutoffs classify as normal, a pattern well-documented in Vietnamese and broader Asian populations but poorly captured by existing screening criteria. His findings demonstrate that waist circumference-based obesity definitions substantially outperform BMI in identifying metabolic risk in this population, with direct implications for revising national surveillance and clinical screening protocols. The broader aim is to convert routine clinical data from Vietnamese health systems into actionable burden estimates for NCD policy in LMIC settings.

Dengue and arboviral disease modelling

Dr. Quan and his team Professor Andrew W. Taylor-Robinson develop forecasting and spatial modelling approaches for dengue and other mosquito-borne arboviruses across complementary scales. At the regional/national level, he uses Vietnam's 1998–2021 provincial surveillance data (by Gibb et al., 2023) and the OpenDengue database (by Oliver J. Brady) to model sub-national dengue burden across Southeast Asia, with particular focus on the "inverted U-shape" hypothesis: that incidence peaks not in the poorest or wealthiest provinces but in transitional, rapidly urbanizing areas where expanding Aedes habitat, lagging water and sanitation infrastructure, and rising population density converge. At the micro-scale, he contributes to a Hanoi field study deploying drone-acquired 3D mapping of a 2.4 km × 2.4 km urban area at 10 cm resolution, linked with systematic mosquito trapping, spatial analysis (QGIS, R), and climatic covariates (temperature, precipitation, humidity) to resolve fine-grained associations between built-environment features, Aedes distribution, and transmission risk.

Global Burden of Disease and comparative health metrics

Dr. Quan applies Global Burden of Disease (GBD/IHME) methods to benchmark Vietnam's and Southeast Asia's disease landscape against global patterns. This work draws on GBD estimates generated through DisMod-MR 2.1, DisMod AT (GBD 2023 shift), and CODEm, using analytic & visualization frameworks that include ASIR, ASMR, DALYs, PAF, and demographic–epidemiologic decomposition to characterize secular trends in a wide range of CDs, NCDs, and AMR burden.

Select Publications

Quan NK, Taylor-Robinson AW. A “paradox of progress” shapes the social determinants of infectious diseases in Vietnam, 1975–2025. Nature Communications 17, 3222 (2026). Doi: 10.1038/s41467-026-71419-7

Quan NK, Anh NLM, Taylor-Robinson AW (2023). The global COVID-19 vaccine surplus: Tackling expiring stockpiles. Infectious Disease of Poverty. doi: 10.1186/s40249-023-01070-7

Minh LHN, Quan NK, Le TN, Khanh PNQ, Huy NT. COVID-19 Timeline of Vietnam: Important Milestones Through Four Waves of the Pandemic and Lesson Learned. Frontiers in Public Health. 2021 Nov 24;9:709067. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.709067.

Quan NK, Taylor-Robinson AW. Vietnam's Evolving Healthcare System: Notable Successes and Significant Challenges. Cureus. 2023 Jun 14;15(6):e40414. doi: 10.7759/cureus.40414

Quan NK, Taylor-Robinson AW (2025). Behavioral Interventions for Preventing Infectious Diseases. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Concepts in Health, Health Behavior and Environmental Health. Springer, Singapore. doi: 10.1007/978-981-97-0821-5_35-1.

Quan NK, Liamputtong, P. (2025). Human Behavior and One Health: A Framework for Change. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Concepts in Health, Health Behavior and Environmental Health. Springer, Singapore. doi: 10.1007/978-981-97-0821-5_45-1.

Quan NK, Liamputtong P. (2023). Social Surveys and Public Health. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Social Sciences and Global Public Health. Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-96778-9_68-1

Quan NK, Liamputtong P. (2023). Systematic Review and Evidence Synthesis in Public Health. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Social Sciences and Global Public Health. Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-96778-9_143-1

Quan NK, Taylor-Robinson AW. Vietnam's Evolving Healthcare System: Notable Successes and Significant Challenges. Cureus. 2023 Jun 14;15(6):e40414. doi: 10.7759/cureus.40414.

Dat TV, Tu VL, Quan NK, Minh NH, Trung TD, Le TN, Phuc-Vinh D, Trinh DT, Pham Dinh L, Nguyen-Thi HY, Huy NT. Telepharmacy: A Systematic Review of Field Application, Benefits, Limitations, and Applicability During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Telemedicine and e-Health. 2023 Feb;29(2):209-221. doi: 10.1089/tmj.2021.0575.

GBD 2021 Lower Respiratory Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators (Quan NK). Global, regional, and national incidence and mortality burden of non-COVID-19 lower respiratory infections and aetiologies, 1990-2021: a systematic analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. Lancet Infectious Disease. 2024 Apr 15:S1473-3099(24)00176-2. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(24)00176-2

GBD 2021 Demographics Collaborators (Quan NK). Global age-sex-specific mortality, life expectancy, and population estimates in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1950-2021, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. Lancet. 2024 May 18;403(10440):1989-2056. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00476-8

Last Updated: 20 April 2026