Dr Nittaya Phanuphak

Dr Nittaya Phanuphak is currently the Executive Director at the Institute of HIV Research and Innovation (IHRI) in Bangkok, Thailand.

She has deep interest in HIV prevention and key populations (KP), especially around the use of Key Population-Led Health Service (KPLHS) approaches to enhance access to HIV testing, prevention and treatment among men who have sex with men and transgender women.

She currently works actively with community and government partners to establish a national technical assistance platform to support the accreditation and legalization of KP lay providers to ensure KPLHS sustainability through domestic financing mechanism.

In 2015, she supported the establishment of the Tangerine Clinic using integrated hormone therapy and sexual health service approach to effectively bring more than 4,000 transgender women (TGW) and transgender men into services over a 5-year period. The model is currently being expanded to community-based organizations (CBOs), as well as public and private clinics, working with transgender people in the region.

Dr Phanuphak started her career in the HIV field in 2002, leading a country-wide prevention of mother-to-child transmission operational study which led Thai guidelines to allow the use of three-drug antiretroviral regimens for pregnant women in 2010.

She has been the International AIDS Society (IAS) Governing Council Representative of Asia and the Pacific Islands since 2018, and previously served as Chief of the SEARCH and PREVENTION units of the Thai Red Cross AIDS Research Centre.

Dr Phanuphak has published over 180 peer-reviewed articles and she serves as the Deputy Editor for the Journal of the International AIDS Society. 

Education:

MD, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

PhD, Medicine, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands