Soe Yu Naing is a public health professional with more than ten years of experience in public health, project management, and scientific research. He received an international M.Sc. in Infectious Diseases and One Health (IDOH) from the Université de Tours (France), the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), and the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom). He is a product of liberal arts education and has a bachelor's degree in Neuroscience from Earlham College in the United States.

Later, he joined the University of Pennsylvania to work on research toward HIV cure. At Penn, he conducted different phases of clinical trials on Zika, Ebola vaccine, Hepatitis C, and HIV "cure" and therapeutics projects using a gene therapy approach in human clinical trials. He is currently working as a researcher at the department of infectious diseases and immunity at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His work mainly focuses on harnessing the potential of Whole-Genome Sequencing (WGS) in medical microbiology, the surveillance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and molecular epidemiology of emerging infectious diseases. Currently, he is working on his Ph.D. thesis on a multidisciplinary project titled "Impact of reducing colistin use on colistin resistance in humans and poultry in Indonesia (COINCIDE)" that takes place in Indonesia in collaboration with partners from Belgium, Canada, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. He also collaborates with research institutions, including Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGLOBAL), One Health Trust (OHT). He works as a consultant for the World Health Organization (WHO). He is also a visiting faculty at Parami University, teaching courses on research methods, infectious diseases, and One Health.

In his free time, he often talks about sex to break the taboo around sexual and reproductive health (SRH) in Myanmar.