About & Experience

I'm a Mongolian-born epidemiologist and open-source R developer, now working in climate and environmental health with Island Health's PHASE team in Victoria, BC. My path has taken me from medical school in Ulaanbaatar to a Fulbright-funded MPH, a PhD in epidemiology, outbreak leadership in Mongolia, and the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program.

  • Public-health leadership. Led seven departments and approximately 300 staff during Mongolia's first major COVID-19 surge.
  • Practical tools. Built two CRAN-published R packages: mongolstats connects researchers with official Mongolian statistics, and mongolmaps maps Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar at every open administrative level.
  • Teaching and research. Trained epidemiologists internationally through Applied Epi and published research spanning environmental health and infectious diseases.

Professional Journey

Jun 2026 – Present
Senior Epidemiologist | Island Health · Population Health Assessment, Surveillance & Epidemiology (PHASE)
  • Senior epidemiologist on the PHASE team in Victoria, BC, focusing on climate and environmental health while supporting surveillance, population health assessment, outbreak investigation, and emergency response across the region.
  • Provide technical mentorship and analytic leadership to PHASE epidemiologists and analysts, including reproducible R workflows, spatial and time-series analysis, and data visualization.
  • Advance climate and environmental health assessment, connecting exposure science with population health surveillance to inform extreme-weather and environmental response.
Aug 2024 – Jun 2026
Field Epidemiologist (CFEP Fellow) | Public Health Agency of Canada · Interior Health
  • Investigated communicable disease outbreaks and conducted surveillance for the Interior Health region, including measles outbreak response with automated epidemiological reporting.
  • Designed and deployed an interactive syphilis surveillance dashboard using R/Quarto, achieving pilot evaluation scores of 5.0/5 for overall impression and 4.9/5 for usefulness; CCDR manuscript under review.
  • Built multi-source ETL pipelines and privacy-preserving analytics dashboards for STI surveillance, integrating disparate lab data streams into unified monitoring tools.
  • Developed heat and cold vulnerability indices for Interior Health's extreme weather response using spatial hotspot analysis and administrative health data.
  • Served as rotating Epidemiologist-on-Duty, running weekly aberration detection and providing consultation to Medical Health Officers across the region.
Sep 2022 – Aug 2024
Lead R Instructor | Applied Epi Inc.
  • Delivered introductory and advanced R courses (statistics, GIS) to applied epidemiologists across multiple countries including Canada, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Rwanda.
  • Provided 1-on-1 technical mentorship, adapting instruction to diverse skill levels and language backgrounds.
  • Core contributor and Mongolian translator for the Epidemiologist R Handbook, used by thousands of practitioners worldwide.
Earlier experience · 2009–2024
Feb 2023 – Apr 2024
Coordinator, Applied Epidemiology Manual | Applied Epi Inc.
  • Recruited and onboarded an international authorship team of subject-matter experts (including contributors from MSF and academic institutions) for a free, open-source field epidemiology reference guide.
  • Managed editorial workflows, contributor agreements, and milestone tracking across distributed teams, delivering the initial development phase on schedule before handover.
Oct 2022 – May 2023
Country Review Team Leader | IOD PARC Ltd. (The Global Fund)
  • Led the Enhanced Portfolio Review of Global Fund HIV and TB grants in Mongolia, managing inception interviews, field data collection, and stakeholder dissemination.
  • Authored final HIV and TB country evaluation reports with executive summaries, informing Global Fund investment strategies.
Apr 2022 – Sep 2022
Consultant Epidemiologist | WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific
  • Provided technical coordination for COVID-19 modeling strategies and sero-epidemiological studies across WHO member states in the Western Pacific.
  • Supported Ministries of Health in the Philippines and Malaysia with frontline technical guidance, contributing to evidence-based pandemic response measures.
Nov 2021 – Mar 2022
Technical Consultant | WHO Mongolia Country Office
  • Developed study analysis plans and facilitated protocol implementation for WHO UNITY seroprevalence studies, contributing to published findings in Lancet Regional Health.
  • Coordinated the establishment of Mongolia's first whole-genome sequencing laboratory at the National Center for Communicable Diseases.
Sep 2020 – Oct 2021
Epidemiologist / Acting Deputy Director | National Center for Communicable Diseases
  • Led seven departments and ~300 personnel as Acting Deputy Director (Jan-May 2021) during Mongolia's first major COVID-19 surge, overseeing immunization, surveillance, and laboratory operations.
  • Delivered 70+ TV appearances and 30+ media interviews translating epidemiological evidence for the public during daily COVID-19 briefings.
  • Negotiated data-sharing agreements with Google and Apple to deploy the national Exposure Notification System.
  • Conducted on-site evaluations of national TB units across Mongolia, producing jurisdiction-specific recommendations for resource allocation.
Aug 2014 – May 2020
Research & Teaching Assistant | Keck School of Medicine, USC
  • Analyzed spatiotemporal air pollution exposure data for Ulaanbaatar using case-crossover designs, machine learning (Random Forest, GAMs), and distributed lag models across multiple published manuscripts.
  • Contributed to a ~$2M NIH/NIEHS grant on environmental and respiratory health in Mongolia, supporting fieldwork, statistical analyses, and progress reporting.
  • Taught 7 graduate-level epidemiology and biostatistics courses, supporting 120+ students across in-class and online formats.
Oct 2009 – Jun 2012
Project Assistant | Mongolian FETP (WHO)
  • Supported coordination of the national FETP, contributing to the training of 12 field epidemiologists.
  • Published 4 programme newsletters and contributed to the WHO Representative Office annual report.

Education

2014 – 2020
PhD in Epidemiology | Keck School of Medicine – University of Southern California
Researched ambient air pollution's effects on health in Ulaanbaatar. Utilized case-crossover design and spatiotemporal models.
2012 – 2014
MPH in Environmental Health Sciences | Arnold School of Public Health – University of South Carolina
Fulbright Scholarship. Led multipollutant pilot project using EPA's BenMAP.
2003 – 2009
Bachelor of Medicine | Mongolian National University of Medical Sciences

Skills

Epidemiology Outbreak Investigation Biostatistics Spatiotemporal Modeling R SQL Python Machine Learning Data Visualization Shiny Quarto Public Health Surveillance System Design Statistical Modeling GIS (ArcGIS, QGIS, sf) Reproducible Research Git Power BI Science Communication Research Design

Languages

English (Fluent) Mongolian (Native) French (Basic) Russian (Basic)

Selected publications

12 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Lancet Regional Health: Western Pacific, Environment International, JESEE, and WPSAR. Research spans air pollution epidemiology, COVID-19 seroprevalence, tuberculosis surveillance, and respiratory health.