Parinita Bhattacharjee

Bhattacharjee took a Bachelor of Arts in political science at Wilson College, Mumbai, in 1993, and a master's degree in medical and psychiatric social work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, in 1995. She later completed a PhD at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

Bhattacharjee has more than two decades of experience in designing and managing public health programmes. She was among those who established the India Health Action Trust, and supports the organisation by providing strategic direction on community-centred programme design and implementation. In India she was involved in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Avahan HIV prevention initiative, and served on the National AIDS Control Organisation's technical working group for scaling up the Link Worker Scheme.

She has provided technical support for HIV prevention programmes in a number of Asian and African countries, including Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Malawi and Côte d'Ivoire, and leads the technical support units advising the Government of Kenya on scaling up HIV prevention. She has led the gender and violence working group of the STRIVE consortium, which was run by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and has acted as lead technical adviser for the key populations pillar of the South-to-South Learning Network under the UNAIDS-led Global Prevention Coalition.

An advocate of programme science — the practice of making research directly useful to programmes and policy — she has published journal articles, strategy papers and training manuals on HIV prevention, interventions with key populations, gender-based violence and community mobilisation. Her current research includes work on adolescent girls and young women across five African countries and on innovations such as HIV self-testing.[2][3][4]