Bussarawan “Puk” Teerawichitchainan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore (NUS). A social demographer and sociologist, her research lies at the intersection of family demography, social gerontology, population health, and social stratification. Her work examines how changing family and kinship structures, social institutions, and public policy shape health, care, and well-being across the life course, with a particular focus on aging populations in Southeast Asia.

A major strand of her research focuses on kinship, family relationships, and aging in rapidly changing demographic contexts. She led the Ministry of Education-funded Childless Aging in Singapore and Thailand (CAST) project, which examines how childlessness and limited family ties shape social networks, care arrangements, health, and end-of-life planning in later life. More broadly, she has led or co-led major survey data collection efforts in Vietnam, Singapore, Myanmar, and Thailand, building population-based data resources to study aging, intergenerational relationships, health, and family change across Southeast Asia.

She is also Co-Principal Investigator of the Vietnam Health and Aging Study, funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. This longitudinal study investigates the long-term consequences of war and trauma for health, psychological well-being, and family relationships among older Vietnamese adults. Her more recent research extends this comparative agenda to population and demographic resilience in Southeast Asia, examining how population aging, low fertility, migration, changing labor markets, and transformations in family and care systems interact to shape the region’s capacity to respond to demographic change.

Teerawichitchainan previously served as Co-Director of the Centre for Family and Population Research at NUS from 2020 to 2025. In 2025-26, she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Prior to joining NUS in 2019, she was Associate Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University, where she served as Associate Dean (Research) of the School of Social Sciences in 2016-17. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington and has received fellowships and scholarships from the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Population Council.

She is Deputy Editor of Demography and serves on the editorial boards of Social Science & Medicine, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Asian Population Studies, and the Journal of Aging Studies. She is also active in international research and editorial collaborations on kinship and family change, population aging, care, and population health.