Grown up in Ethiopia, Hamid Hassen is an Epidemiologist, currently working as R&D researcher at the Flemish Institute of Technological Research (VITO). He studied Master of Epidemiology at the University of Antwerp as a VLIR-UOS scholar from 2017 to 2019. Then after, he joined the Department of Family Medicine and Population Health at the University of Antwerp as doctoral researcher in the SPICES project - Scaling-up Packages of Interventions for cardiovascular disease prevention in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is finalizing his PHD on ‘Disparities in CVD across contexts and evaluation of effectiveness of preventive interventions in vulnerable communities’ at the University of Antwerp. His current research looks at risk factors of non-communicable diseases, mainly cardiovascular diseases and cancer, development and validation of prediction models, and implementation of prevention strategies. He also focuses on advances in epidemiological & statistical methods and evaluation of health outcome measurement tools. In his above 5 years of academic and research experience, Hamid authored more than 50 peer reviewed articles in international reputable journals.