Cultivating Sustainable Peace Culture in School

Dr. Tapanya is a clinical psychologist at the Peace Culture Foundation, a non-profit organization in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is retired from his teaching position at the Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Chiang Mai University where he taught between 1985-2011. His research interests and clinical work are mostly on violence prevention and treatment of trauma resulting from abuse and violence.

From 2010 to the present, he has been co-principal investigator for Thailand in the Parenting Across Cultures project funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (http://parentingacrosscultures.org/).

During 2018-2019, Dr. Tapanya was also co-principal investigator of the Parenting for Lifelong Health project, supported by UNICEF Thailand and University of Oxford. The project was a randomized controlled trial with 120 low-income families in rural north-eastern Thailand. The program has been found to be effective in reducing maltreatment of children by parents and behavioral problems in children, and improving parents’ mental health. The program has been adopted by the Thai Public Health Ministry and is in the process of scaling up currently.

Dr. Tapanya obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Chiang Mai University, Master of Science degrees in Special Education and Counselor Education from the Southern Connecticut State University, and obtained his PhD in Psychology from the University of New Brunswick, Canada.