About
Lai has been long engaged in interdisciplinary research focusing on human behaviour, population dynamics, environmental changes, and infectious disease transmission and interventions. He has >150 papers published in scientific journals such as Nature, Science, Lancet Infectious Diseases, Nature Medicine, Nature Human Behaviour, BMJ, and Nature Communications. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has been leading a series of influential studies for understanding the COVID-19 transmission dynamics and intervention effectiveness, using epidemiological and mobility data obtained from different novel ‘big data’ sources. The findings of these studies have been timely shared with the WHO, Africa CDC, Europe CDC, China CDC, among others, for tailoring COVID-19 intervention strategies, and also featured in main media outlets across the world. His studies on exploring how to use mobile phone data for measuring population mobility, migration and dynamics have aroused great interest, being presented at multiple international conferences including the United Nations 5th International Conference on Big Data for Official Statistics.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Lai is interested in understanding the transmission dynamics and intervention effectiveness for infectious diseases; Quantifying seasonal human mobility, social connectivity and migration using novel data sources, e.g. mobile phone data; Investigating spatiotemporal interactions between human behaviour, environmental change and infectious disease dynamics.
Current research
Funded by several national and international funders, as PI/project lead in Southampton, his current research below is focusing on measuring human mobility and the transmission dynamics and intervention effects for different infectious diseases, e.g. COVID-19, dengue, malaria, and influenza.
- MOnitoring Outbreak events for Disease surveillance in a data science context (MOOD), funded by EU Horizon, 2020-2024
- Human mobility models to forecast disease dynamics and the effectiveness of public health interventions, funded by the National Institute for Health (NIH) via John Hopkins University, 2021-2026
- The fear of 'here': Integrating place-based travel behaviour and detection into novel infectious disease models, funded by the National Science Foundation, 2023-2026.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Prizes
- 2021 Vice-Chancellor's Awards - Early Career (2021)
- Dean’s Prize for Research (2019)
- Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed (non-government sponsored) Students Abroad (2017)
- 2nd prize of 2016 Medical Science and Technology Award of China (2017)
- 3rd prize of 2016 Medical Science and Technology Award of China (2017)
- 2nd prize of 2016 Science and Technology Progress Award of Beijing (2016)
- 2nd prize of 2016 Science and Technology Progress Award of Beijing (2016)
- 2nd prize of 2022 Science and Technology Progress Award, Ministry of Education of P.R. China (2023)