Direk is the Head of Microbiology at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (http://www.tropmedres.ac), Professor of Epidemiology at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Thailand, and Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology of the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. His main research areas include sepsis, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and melioidosis.
Direk has led multiple studies on the epidemiology of sepsis in Thailand and other low—and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Southeast Asia. He emphasizes the need for context-specific approaches to managing sepsis in resource-limited settings. He has evaluated and advocated for improved diagnostic and antibiotic stewardship, particularly in enhancing blood culture testing in LMICs.
He also developed an offline, open-access, and easy-to-use application that allows a hospital to perform data analysis and generate AMR surveillance reports automatically and independently (www.amass.website; JMIR 2020). This application has been adopted by the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) Thailand (JAC AMR 2023; J Infect 2024) to allow public hospitals in Thailand to independently perform data analysis and generate AMR surveillance reports. The new Thailand AMR dashboard is open-access and is being used to support both local and national actions on AMR. This work also supports efforts to combat sepsis and bloodstream infections in the country.