Nine (9) MSc and PhD research opportunities leveraging 20 years of data from Southeast Asia’s largest population biobank.

The Malaysian Cohort (TMC) has followed 119,671 participants for two decades across three survey waves, with over 8 million banked biospecimens. It is the only cohort in the world that recruited Malay, Chinese and Indian participants under one harmonised protocol, alongside indigenous Orang Asli and Bornean (Sabah and Sarawak) communities.

That makes it uniquely able to answer a question the large international biobanks cannot: why does so much medical evidence generated elsewhere fail to describe Malaysians?

Projects:

1. Recalibrating global cardiovascular risk equations for Malaysia’s three major ethnic groups (PhD/MSc)

2. Why polygenic risk scores fail in Southeast Asians: a systematic transferability atlas (PhD)

3. Redefining obesity thresholds: metabolic risk at low BMI in Malaysian populations (MSc)

4. Twenty-year trajectories of cardiometabolic risk: when does divergence begin? (PhD/MSc)

5. Multimorbidity in Malaysia: how chronic diseases cluster and what it costs (MSc)

6. The Malaysian diet and the genome: gene–environment interaction in diabetes and heart disease (PhD)

7. Causal inference in a non-European population: Mendelian randomisation in TMC (PhD)

8. Pharmacogenomics in practice: how many Malaysians receive a drug their genes contraindicate? (MSc)

9. Deep learning on retinal images and ECGs for Asian cardiovascular risk prediction (PhD)