Student Profiles

Born to a family of physicians in Yangon, Myanmar (Burma) and raised across Southeast Asia, Hsu Hnin (Sandra) Mon always harbored a curiosity for biomedicine in the context of shifting social, political, and geographical environments.

Sandra nurtured this curiosity further during her undergraduate days at Colgate University, where she majored in Molecular Biology, minored in Asian Studies, and explored the interdisciplinary linkages between diseases and the communities they impact. She conducted virology research under Dr. Geoffrey Holm, who introduced her to – and fostered her passion for – the field of infectious disease epidemiology.

After her Bachelor’s, Sandra pursued a research assistantship with Dr. Christopher Plowe at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, whose research on the molecular surveillance of artemisinin-resistant P. falciparum malaria expanded her professional ambitions into molecular epidemiology and pathogen genomics.

Sandra then completed a Master of Science in Public Health in Global Disease Epidemiology and Control in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins, where she focused on infectious disease epidemiology, humanitarian health, and implementation science. Following her Masters, she joined the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights (CPHHR) under the mentorship of Drs. Chris Beyrer and Andrea Wirtz. Her research portfolio with CPHHR includes an implementation science study assessing obstacles to and innovations in the HIV care continuum for men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women (TGW) in Myanmar; an NIH R01 evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among young MSM and TGW who sell or exchange sex in Thailand; a mixed methods epidemiologic assessment of violence and mortality following the 2017 genocidal campaign against the Rohingya; and most recently, a project documenting and evaluating attacks on healthcare resulting from the 2021 attempted military coup d’état in Myanmar. She also serves as a Commissioner on the International AIDS Society-Lancet Commission on Health and Human Rights.

Today, Sandra’s research interests revolve around infectious disease dynamics, phylogenetic analysis, and health & human rights policy. Through her NIH-OxCam research with Dr. Tom Quinn and Prof. Christophe Fraser, Sandra aims to identify epidemiologic (population- and network-level) and evolutionary (within-host) factors associated with HIV acquisition and pathogenesis. She also intends to apply a human rights lens to this research to understand the role of stigma and other social disparities in perpetuating transmission within identified networks. She hopes that this research will help optimize HIV phylodynamic models to better design effective HIV interventions for the most vulnerable populations.

Beyond her research and health & human rights work, Sandra enjoys cooking, doting on her cats and (pet) rats, and managing her dog’s Instagram.