Pavlo Smyrnov is Deputy Executive Director of Alliance for Public Health in Ukraine. Pavlo has developed and implemented interventions to improve HIV case-finding and linkage to ART for key populations, mostly people who inject drugs, sex workers and men who have sex with men. Pavlo have over 17 years of experience in managing nationwide health programs in the context of a concentrated HIV epidemic. In last few years he was involved in transitioning of HIV services for key population from donor to government funding. Pavlo contributed to development of interventions that are based on social and risk network strategies to reach hidden populations such as peer-driven intervention (PDI), and improve case finding for HIV such as optimized case finding (OCF). Data collected during implementation and scale-up of those interventions helped to understand factors associated with undiagnosed cases, helped to improve case finding and linkage to care and led to application of machine learning for guiding recruitment chains to clusters with higher probabilities of undiagnosed infection.
Pavlo acted as in-country lead for NIH funded project TRIP (Transmission-Reduction Intervention Project) which aim to prevent HIV transmission by focusing HIV prevention on social and risk networks of recently infected people. Pavlo served as Principal Investigator for KPIS (Key population implementation study) supported by CDC to evaluate intervention which improves access to HIV treatment for people who inject drugs in Ukraine and currently act as Principal Director/Principal Investigator for CDC supported flagship project in Ukraine aimed to improve HIV case finding, linkage and retention for key populations and improving strategic information on National level.
Most recently Pavlo was involved in implementing rapid deployment teams for reaching to most at risk populations and organizing humanitarian convoys that deliver emergency supplies of food, medicine and other products to cities and towns that experience humanitarian and health care crisis.
