The UC Berkeley School of Public Health is consistently rated alongside the best in the nation, with recent rankings placing its doctoral programs in Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Environmental Health Sciences, and Health Policy among the top in their fields. The school is ranked 8th in the country by U.S. News & World Report. Established in 1943, it was the first school of public health west of the Mississippi River. The school is currently accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health. The School of Public Health offers two professional degrees, the Master of Public Health (MPH) and the Doctor of Public Health (DrPH).
In Southeast Asia, most adults have been vaccinated at least once against COVID. Yet, vaccine confidence remains an important global health issue as more young people become eligible for COVID vaccines every year and as the waning immunity presents an increased likelihood for more immunization in the near future. Vaccine confidence is continuously challenged by the ubiquity of social media content that highlights the potential negative consequences of vaccines, distrust in public health and science, and many more. However, literature on vaccine misinformation in Malay language, which is spoken by over 200 million people primarily in multiple countries in Southeast Asia, as well as on vaccine confidence in these communities remain limited.
This project aims to characterize the types and sentiments of vaccine-related content in Malay language that are available publicly on social media platforms. Understanding the common themes across vaccine misinformation will help us design and deliver effective and resource-efficient interventions on these social media platforms. Through this project, the data discovery team will have the opportunity to be acquainted with the global health issues affecting the underrepresented Malay-speaking communities and to gain experiences with Natural Language Processing (NLP) in non-English language context.
This semester-long project is the first part of a two-year research project that is primarily led by Wan Nurul Naszeerah, MPH at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Wan works closely with mentors, including misinformation experts, from the US and several stakeholders in Southeast Asia.
