Amy Hwong MBBS, MS, PhD

Amy Wen Yea Hwong was born on the 24th of July 1984 in Sarawak, Malaysia. Funded by the Malaysian Public Services Department, she undertook her undergraduate medical degree at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom from 2004 to 2009 before she returned to her home country to practice medicine. She was in clinical practice for a few years before she decided to join the Institute for Clinical Research (back then, called the National Clinical Research Centre) within the Ministry of Health Malaysia in 2012 where she was entrusted to handle national surveys.

In 2014, she took up the opportunity to study MSc in Epidemiology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Subsequently, she obtained the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) grant under her Graduate Ph.D. Program in Epidemiology in Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht to pursue her Ph.D. in September 2016 under the supervision of Professor Michiel Bots and Dr. Ilonca Vaartjes from UMC Utrecht as well as Dr. Sharmini Selvarajah and Dr. Sheamini Sivasampu from Malaysia. Her project aimed to improve the delivery of stroke care in Malaysia where she worked on estimating essential stroke metrics for the country, evaluating local preventive efforts as well as identifying measures to optimize stroke care in settings of inadequate resources.

As part of the continuation of her Ph.D. work, she is currently working as a researcher at the Institute for Clinical Research, National Institutes of Health in Malaysia in the area of stroke care.