Gabriel Leung

He read medicine at the University of Western Ontario, completing his family medicine residency training in Toronto. Leung received his master’s from Harvard University in 1999, and earned his research doctorate at HKU.

Leung’s career combines academic research, teaching, government service and global engagements. Debrett’s Hong Kong 100 lists Leung as one of the 100 most influential people in Hong Kong.

Since the year preceding Leung’s deanship (2012-13) to the academic year 2019-20, HKU's Medical Faculty advanced eight places (36th to 28th) in the Times Higher Education University Rankings for Clinical, Preclinical, and Health programmes.

Leung established and directed the University’s Infectious Disease Epidemiology Group since the time of the 2003 SARS epidemic and led Hong Kong government’s efforts against pandemic H1N1 in 2009. He was founding co-director of HKU's World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control, an institution designated by the Director-General of WHO to form part of an international collaborative network set up by WHO in support of its programme at the country, intercountry, regional, interregional and global levels. Leung’s team of investigators is now recognised as one of the leading epidemiological laboratories in the field of influenza research.

Internationally, Leung is a founding co-director of HKU’s World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Control, and has served on the International Expert Group Convening on Pandemic Emergency Preparedness for G7 Summit, the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola and was an expert reviewer for the United Nations Secretary-General High-level Panel on the Global Response to Health Crises.

He also reformed many aspects of admission infrastructure and launched ‘Springboard’ and ‘Second Chance’ scholarships, which are awarded to first year students from minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds. These undertakings led to some of the highest scoring intakes in the faculty’s history.

Leung holds an admiration for the ideal of a "polymath" who masters several apparently disparate disciplines. In a speech delivered at the 2014 Anthony J Hedley Lecture of the School of Public Health in honour of his mentor that the lecture was named after, Leung spoke of "a renaissance quality" that has become "a rarity in today’s world of super-specialisation and the Fordian reductive approach to hone perfection". Leung said he saw in Prof Hedley "the qualities of a generalist with a strategic command of the full ecoscape of all that matter to population health but one who can at once become a competent, even expert, specialist in a specific area when called upon", which epitomised what he said he has been modelling after in his career.

In August 2013, Leung was appointed as the fortieth Dean of the HKU's Medical Faculty at age 40, becoming the second youngest dean ever appointed at HKU. He has also became a member of the Hospital Authority Board (statutory agency in Hong Kong responsible for all public health care services) since 2013, and completed two terms on the University Grants Committee (an advisory body on the development and funding requirements of the higher education sector in Hong Kong) from 2014 to 2019.

Leung also steered the Faculty to secure five InnoHK research centres at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park – the highest number for a faculty amongst the higher education sector, and was directly responsible for securing over 1.6 billion HKD in philanthropic donations (including a 1.24 billion HKD donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust that is the single largest donation received by the University to date) and 3.2 billion HKD government capital works support.

Leung returned to HKU after finishing his term with the government in 2012, serving as the head of the Department of Community Medicine and founding acting director of the School of Public Health until 2013. Leung completed an organisational review leading to the consolidation of various cognate and related academic units into a new School of Public Health. He secured the Patrick Manson Building to bring all constituent units of the new School together at the Sassoon Road campus.

He directs the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, and was an elected council member of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine in 2012–2019.

Also, Leung has been the inaugural Master of Chi Sun College, a residential college for HKU students, since 2012. He raised 70 million HKD to endow the College plus a further 4.5 million HKD for additional refurbishment of the College Library and Lobby Lounge. As the College master, Leung pioneered a novel model of residential learning based on the Oxbridge collegiate system and HKU’s century-old hall experience. He led the College to have consistently become the most oversubscribed residential hall in the University.

Leung has also pioneered the development of cost-effectiveness, health systems, financing and policy research in Hong Kong and around the Asia Pacific region. From 2010 until 2014, he served as inaugural Chair of the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems Policies and continues to lead its Strategic Technical Advisory Committee (2018–), a multipartite partnership of governments, development agencies and the research community. His team has also been commissioned by the Hong Kong government to develop and evaluate screening strategies for breast and colorectal cancer prevention, as well as to undertake projections to inform human resources for health planning.

In 2008, Leung joined the HKSAR government and served as the first Under Secretary for Food and Health until 2011. From 2011–2012, he was appointed the Director of Office of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, being the fifth appointed to this role and the youngest office bearer outside the Administrative Service. In this role, he assisted the Chief Executive in coordinating and directing government policies and liaised with district councils, the Legislative Council, and mainland authorities at national and provincial levels. He coordinated the first overlapping transition between two successive administrations in the history of Hong Kong.

He edited the Journal of Public Health from 2007-2014, was inaugural co-editor of Epidemics, associate editor of Health Policy and is founding deputy editor-in-chief of China CDC Weekly. He currently serves on the editorial boards of seven journals, including the British Medical Journal.

In 2005, he travelled to Harvard University as a Takemi Fellow, returning to HKU as a full professor in 2006. From 2006-2008, Leung was also the Vice President and Censor in Public Health Medicine for the Hong Kong College of Community Medicine.

In 2003, during the SARS epidemic, Leung established and directed the Infectious Diseases Epidemiology Group. He led the group's work, which focused on field studies and modelling of directly transmissible respiratory pathogens.

In 1999, Leung joined the medical faculty at HKU as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Community Medicine (now the School of Public Health) in 1999 and became an Associate Professor in 2004. He was one of the University’s youngest ever tenured full professors at the age of 33.

Leung's team has leveraged on several large-scale longitudinal cohort studies, namely the "Children of 1997" birth cohort, Hong Kong Department of Health Elderly Health Service cohort and FAMILY cohort, to test a series of novel hypotheses based on a socio-historical perspective of life course epidemiological theory. These investigations have proposed novel insights about the fundamental biologic pathways leading to common non-communicable diseases, namely cardiovascular disease and Type II diabetes, with global health relevance.

Gabriel Matthew Leung (Chinese: 梁卓偉 ; Jyutping: Loeng4 Coek3 Wai5 , born 6 November 1972) is a Hong Kong physician and public health authority who has served as the fortieth Dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) since 2013. He made major contributions to epidemiological research during the SARS (2003), Avian Influenza A H7N9 (2013) and COVID-19 (2020) pandemics, and also led the Hong Kong government’s efforts against the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 as the Under Secretary for Food and Health. Leung is recognised as one of Asia’s leading experts on epidemiology and global health.