Dr Anup Gurung

Dr Anup Gurung was appointed the World Health Organization’s Country Liaison Officer to Tonga in March 2024. He is a preventive and social medicine physician and an epidemiologist with more than 30 years of work experience in public health leadership roles focusing mainly on South Asia, the Pacific, and parts of Africa.

Prior to taking on this role, Dr Gurung led the communicable disease and health emergencies teams at WHO Papua New Guinea for almost a decade, providing normative guidance and technical assistance. Dr Gurung’s support to Papua New Guinea focused on country-level interventions in health emergencies, improving health security using a systems approach, integrated disease approaches at the grassroots, and working with marginalized and hard-to-reach communities.

Dr Gurung has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers and has recently issued a new infectious disease model, “Syphilis Interventions Towards Elimination (SITE)”. He has also led global HIV drug resistance studies.

Dr Gurung has worked with a multitude of organizations and donors prior to joining WHO. A particular highlight was his work pioneering the establishment of interventions for the most at-risk populations in India with funding from the Gates Foundation.