DR. HELMY HAJA MYDIN
Consultant Respiratory Physician
Dr. Helmy Haja Mydin is the head of Lung Centre at Pantai Specialist in Kuala Lumpur. As one of the 20 recipients worldwide of the ‘Young Physician Award’ in 2015, he was appointed Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, University Malaya at the age of 33.
A graduate from Newcastle University, Dr. Helmy obtained his Certificate of Completion of Training from the Royal College of Physicians, United Kingdom in general and respiratory medicine. Dr. Helmy also holds a Certificate in Executive Leadership for Healthcare Professionals from Cornell University, USA. His areas of interest include healthcare reform, tobacco control and airways disease. He was elected to the British Thoracic Society’s Professional and Organisational Standards Committee as well as its Tobacco Specialty Advisory Group. He has numerous peer-reviewed publications and has presented nationally, in Europe and the United States.
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Upon his return to Malaysia, he was appointed to the Malaysian Ministry of Health’s Technical Committee on the Effects of Shisha and Electronic Cigarettes and co-founded Project SCOPE, a national training program on smoking cessation, under the auspices of Universiti Malaya’s Nicotine Addiction Research & Collaborating Centre. He was recently elected as the Assistant Treasurer for the Malaysian Thoracic Society.
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Dr. Helmy co-founded Asthma Malaysia as a means to empower patients troubled by asthma. He has also been instrumental in helping shape national tobacco control policy (including appointment to the Ministry of Health's Technical Committee on the Effects of Shisha and Electronic Cigarettes and co-founding Project SCOPE, a national training program on smoking cessation). He sat on the National Taskforce Committee for Early Lung Cancer Screening and the Working Committee for the development of National Clinical Practice Guidelines for smoking cessation.
He is passionate about the challenges affecting society and is a Founding Associate of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAs), a Malaysia-based think tank dedicated to promoting market-based solutions to public policy challenges. A regular columnist for The New Straits Times, Dr. Helmy frequently appears in print, radio and television as a key opinion leader. He is regularly invited to speak at conferences and MNCs, having presented internationally and published in numerous peer-reviewed journals.