Prasert Auewarakul is a professor of virology at the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University, Thailand. He graduated with an M.D. from Mahidol University and Dr. Med. from Heidelberg University, Germany. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health from 1995-1997. He was the president of Biosafety Association (Thailand) from 2012 to 2022, chairman of the Health and Medicine Cluster at the National Science and Technology Development Agency during 2011-2019, president of the Virology Association (Thailand) in 2008-2009, director of Institute of Molecular Biosciences Mahidol University from 2008-2016, and deputy dean for research at the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital from 2017-2022. He is a founding member of Dengue Alliance, an academic partnership coordinated by Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative with the goal of developing specific treatment for dengue hemorrhagic fever. His research interests include biology and pathogenesis of influenza and emerging viruses, and antiviral development. His recent research interest focuses on using host targets for development of broad-spectrum antivirals. Inositol monophosphatase, which is required for phosphatidylinositiol biosynthesis, is among the targets of interest. His past contributions to sciences include identification and characterization of the H5N1 avian influenza virus lineage that caused the original epidemic in Thailand and the region in 2003, identification of the first human-to-human transmission of H5N1, identification of type II pneumocytes as the main viral target cells in humans, and identification of a natural mutant with a change in receptor-binding preference contributing to the understanding of genetic determinants of avian influenza receptor-binding preference.