Dr Poh Lian Lim

Poh Lian Lim MD, MPH is Director for the High-Level Isolation Unit at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases, Head of the Travelers’ Health & Vaccination Clinic at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, and Senior Consultant in the Ministry of Health (MOH), Singapore. She holds academic appointments as Associate Professor on the faculty of LKC and NUS Schools of Medicine and Public Health.

Dr Lim grew up in Malaysia, studied biochemistry at Harvard, medicine at Columbia, and public health at Tulane. She did her internal medicine residency at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, infectious diseases fellowship and MPH in Tropical Medicine at Tulane.

In 2003, Dr Lim moved to Singapore, became a front-line ID physician during the SARS outbreak, and published the first lab-acquired SARS case. She has been active in outbreak responses to dengue, chikungunya, leptospirosis, H1N1 2009, and COVID-19 as well as Singapore’s preparedness for Ebola, MERS, Zika and yellow fever. Dr Lim served as Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Tan Tock Seng Hospital from 2012 to 2016.

She was appointed to the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Steering Committee for a decade, the UN Secretary General’s Global Health Crises Taskforce in 2016, the WHO Advisory Group on Reform of Work in Outbreaks and Health Emergencies in 2015 post-Ebola.  Dr Lim currently chairs the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group for Health Security Interface.