Speakers

Dr. Peeriya Watakulsin is a physician and field epidemiologist with Thailand’s Department of Disease Control, currently serving as Deputy Chief of the Epidemiological Investigation and Network Unit. Over eight years, he has worked at the intersection of outbreak response, health system resilience, and public health emergency management, including cross-border surveillance along the Thailand-Myanmar border and vector-, water-, and food-borne outbreak investigations in migrant and refugee populations.

He led Thailand’s adoption of the 7-1-7 target, beginning with a small regional team that taught itself the approach using online resources before scaling it into a nationwide pilot across all 13 health regions. His team’s after-action review of a 2024 E. coli outbreak at a Myanmar border shelter uncovered critical surveillance bottlenecks, and the fixes they implemented directly strengthened Thailand’s response eight months later to a cross-border cholera outbreak, which was contained to just 10 cases on the Thai side. 717alliance
For this work, Dr. Watakulsin was named winner of the 2026 7-1-7 Nextgen Award, recognizing a rising star among 7-1-7 implementers for an innovative approach to outbreak response, presented at the inaugural 7-1-7 Alliance Awards in Kuala Lumpur. He also received the Youth Award from the Asia Pacific Action Alliance for Human Resources for