Professor Eric Chow heads the Health Data Management and Biostatistics Unit and coheads the HIV/STI Clinical Trial Unit at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, Alfred Health. He is also an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the School of Translational Medicine, Monash University. Eric holds four master’s degrees in Applied Science (Bioinformatics), Public Health, Biostatistics, and Clinical Epidemiology, demonstrating his multidisciplinary expertise.

Eric is an internationally recognised mid-career epidemiologist with expertise in HIV, sexually transmitted infections, public health and health services efficiency. He has >400 peer-reviewed publications in sexually transmitted infections and sexual health services. His work has been cited >11800 times with an h-index of 56 (Google Scholar, December 2024). Since completing his PhD, he has been supported by NHMRC fellowships, including the NHMRC Early Career Fellowship (2015-2018), NHMRC Emerging Leadership Investigator Grant EL2 (2020-2024) and NHMRC Leadership Investigator Grant L1 (2025-2029). He also received an NHMRC Research Excellence Award for the highest-ranked application in the Emerging Leadership category of Investigator Grant EL2 (2019), and the Commonwealth Health Minister’s Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Research (2020). Eric ranks as the world’s second most active author in STI research and third in sexual health services research (SciVal 2024). He was also named on Stanford’s World Top 2% Scientists list (2020–2024) and was named the top researcher in Sex & Sexuality The Australian in 2024.

Melbourne Sexual Health Centre (MSHC) is a major public HIV/STI clinic serving 6 million Victorians. Eric’s innovative work has transformed sexual health services in Victoria, addressing accessibility and efficiency challenges through groundbreaking initiatives:

1. Delivering HIV results by phone to patients rather than face-to-face consultations, saving over 250 hours of clinic time each year for other patients (DOI=10.1177/0956462415623912).

2. Pioneering a nurse-led express HIV/STI testing model that reduced wait times from 53 to 8 minutes, now adopted by other STI clinics across Australia (DOI=10.1097/OLQ.0000000000000777).

3. Showing that distance, instead of socioeconomic status, is the main factor delaying healthcare seeking, highlighting the need for more STI services in Victoria to local services to ensure the equity of healthcare access and disparities of HIV/STI rates

(DOI=10.3389/fmed.2022.915399).

4. Being the first to evaluate sexual health service adaptations during COVID-19, including the introduction of telehealth and changes to testing and prescription protocols, particularly among people who are immunocompromised (DOI=10.1111/1753-6405.13158, and DOI=10.1093/ofid/ofaa536).

5. Evaluating Australia’s first online STI self-diagnostic tool using machine learning and artificial intelligence developed by MSHC’s team (DOI=10.2196/54565; and DOI=10.1177/20552076241289646).