Linwei Wang

Linwei Wang

Senior Research Data Scientist – Epidemiologist

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Linwei is a Senior Research Data Scientist – Epidemiologist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, St Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Applied Biological Science and a Master of Science degree in Epidemiology. She has extensive experience in the field of infectious diseases, including quantitative epidemiological studies of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, and mathematical modeling of HIV transmission. She is experienced in working with large health administrative databases, longitudinal cohort studies, disease surveillance data, and various survey data. Her recent work also includes health equity research in the context of COVID-19 and mechanistic explanatory modeling of COVID-19 transmission and mortality using causal inference and quantitative bias analysis methodologies. Her work also includes analyzing epidemic and behavioral data, both to generate fundamental epidemiological insights and to support model parameterization and calibration.

Health equity research and causal inference methodology: Linwei is leading several quantitative epidemiological studies to investigate the patterns and mechanisms of social and structural inequalities in COVID-19 mortality, leveraging provincial health administrative data in Ontario (in collaboration with ICES). The first phase of the project (published in CID 2023) employed competing for risk survival analyses and demonstrated that area-level social determinants of health are associated with COVID-19-related mortality even after accounting for demographic and clinical factors; and COVID-19 has reversed patterns of lower non-COVID-19 mortality among racially minoritized groups.

The second phase of the project includes evaluating the mediating role of vaccination and inequalities in COVID-19 morality by area-level income and teasing apart mediators of the differential patterns of COVID-19 mortality across racialized communities over time. Leveraging the causal mediation analysis along with quantitative bias analysis (E-value approach), the study has found that social inequalities in COVID-19 mortality by area-level income persisted over time, and the vaccination gap accounted for more than half of inequalities in COVID-19 mortality during wave 4&5. The work is currently under review with AJE.

Building upon these projects, she is currently investigating the role of herd immunity in COVID-19 diagnosis and death.

Sexual network contact patterns and transmission modeling: Linwei led the work of developing a new approach to quantify HIV serosorting (mixing matrices by perceived HIV status) using the Engage study sexual behavioral survey data (AJE 2020). Using this new matrix of serosorting, she led the work of evaluating the influence of serosorting on the HIV transmission impact of pre-exposure prophylaxis using a dynamic compartmental transmission model of HIV (AIDS 2021). Her work showed that ignoring HIV serosorting leads to large underestimates of the population-level impact of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. Thus, capturing this feature of sexual networks can provide more robust model-based evidence to inform intervention decisions.

Linwei has participated as a first author or co-author on these team papers: