Yan Nee Gan

My 13 years of work experience at the Ministry of Health Malaysia has uncovered my passion for public health as I gained vast experiences in different public healthcare facilities such as state hospital, community health clinic, district health office and specialist hospital. In 2014, I was fortunate to be able to pursue a postgraduate Master’s degree in community health at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia under the Federal Training Award by Ministry of Health Malaysia. For my Master’s degree, I conducted a research study looking into patient satisfaction towards pharmacy services in public health clinics which shed light on ways to improve pharmacy services to better serve the local communities. The last three years of assessing various health technologies at the Malaysian Health Technology Assessment Section taught me the importance of bridging the evidence-to-practice gap which led me to pursue a PhD in implementation science at University of Malaya in 2021. I am very privileged to be selected as a doctoral student scholar under the Malaysian Implementation Science Training (MIST) program where I am given the opportunity to undergo one-year training in implementation science at Yale University. Through the MIST program, I have received valuable guidance and remarkable insights from the program advisor, Professor Frederick Altice from Yale University, an esteemed expert in infectious diseases and implementation science. For my PhD research, I will be looking into developing and testing the implementation of a pharmacy-led HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) service delivery model in Malaysia to increase the uptake of PrEP for HIV prevention. I will be working under the guidance of three great mentors and leading experts from University of Malaya: Associate Professor Dr. Raja Iskandar Shah Raja Azwa, a distinguished infectious disease consultant passionate in PrEP research; Dr. Howie Lim Sin How, an epidemiologist known for his accomplishment in HIV research; and Associate Professor Dr. Rafdzah Ahmad Zaki, an epidemiologist with expertise in implementation science. Through this PhD program, I hope to learn from partnerships and collaborative efforts in addressing health inequities, gain networking and leadership skills, and make a difference in health care. This experience will support my long-term goal of becoming a qualified implementation researcher, contributing to capacity-building and development in implementation research at the Ministry of Health Malaysia.