Winner. Scientist of the Year 2021

Le Thi Quynh Mai

Academic title, degree: Professor, Ph.D.
Fields of science: Health Science
Research interest: Virology, Immunology, Molecular epidemiology
Institution: National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology
Position: Deputy Director
Country: Vietnam

Professor Mai began her Arbor virus research at NIHE in Hanoi, Vietnam, and has 13 years of expertise in virology surveillance of Dengue viruses which includes the contribution to improving dengue surveillance control and prevention through the National Dengue Virus Surveillance project. She has been working with SARS since the initial epidemic in Vietnam in 2003, and she has now expanded her carrier to include influenza viruses. She has concentrated on detecting human A/H5N1 infection early and establishing linkages between human and poultry epidemics.

Professor Mai's team was the first to confirm that the pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1) virus caused human illnesses in Vietnam, and they have been essential in defining the virus and its immunopathology. She has been responsible for monitoring National Influenza Surveillance Network in Vietnam, upgrading laboratory capacity, and improving relationships with animal health researchers.

Professor Le Thi Quynh Mai is a part of the leadership of the National Influenza Surveillance System (NISS) in Vietnam, and she is also the Director of the National Influenza Centre, a member of the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS), that updating monthly influenza virological data to the World Health Organization’s FluNet network, as well as sharing representative strains of seasonal flu from Vietnam annually with WHO collaborating centers to select components for an influenza vaccine candidate.

Prof. Dr. Mai has been a PI or has participated as a senior researcher of countless national and international projects. She is one of the leading scientists of the Ha Nam community cohort to study the natural history of influenza. This is one of the longest-running influenza cohort studies (since 2007) and has a hand in expanding our knowledge about influenza immunology in Vietnam.

Professor Mai got in the act as author and co-author of a total of 154 international publications in related fields including Nature (2005, 2006), New England Journal of Medicine (2009), Science (2014), the Lancet (2017), EID (2021). She was a member of the NAFOSTED Scientific Committee in Life Science from 2009 to 2017 and a consultation expert at the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Science and Technology.

In 2009, she was a winner of the Young Women Research Award in Life Sciences field which was decided upon by the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature (Scopus) and the Third World Organization for Women in Science (TWOWS) and TWAS - the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World.

With 32 years of experience, her works especially focus on viral emerging infectious diseases, molecular epidemiology, immunology, and vaccine development. These played a part in the development of prevention strategies in Vietnam as well as the information sharing within the Global Surveillance System.

Professor Le Thi Quynh Mai is the Deputy Director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE), as well as the Director of the National Influenza Center inside NIHE, Vietnam's primary national public health laboratory. Prof. Dr. Mai and her colleagues also played a key role in the country's reaction to COVID-19, which was largely effective until the delta variant spread into the population, resulting in a statewide pandemic that has lasted from April 2021.

When the first suspect cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Vietnam at the end of January 2020, Professor Mai and her team were able to create molecular diagnostics for SARS-CoV-2 before WHO / US CDC procedures were distributed and applied. Prof. Mai's team was the fourth in the country to identify SARS-CoV-2 in early 2020. Professor Mai and her associates have been responsible for a considerable fraction of sequences submitted to GISAID, thanks to extensive international collaborations with Japanese (University of Nagasaki) and UK (University of Oxford) research groups on near real-time viral sequencing capacity of cultured isolates and directly on clinical specimens. With these experiences on COVID-19, they were able to describe SARS-CoV-2 in Vietnam through six scientific papers which have been published on EID and WPSAR in 2021.

A team of women scientists and their leader – Professor Mai were awarded the 2019 Vietnamese Kovalevskaia for their outstanding research on influenza.

Professor Le Thi Quynh Mai was named one of 100 Asian Scientists who have made outstanding contributions to scientific research by the Singapore-based Asian Scientist magazine in 2021. The list honors scientists and leaders whose work contributes to solving some of the world's most serious problems, such as Covid-19 prevention.