Dr Irhanida is a Senior Lecturer in UOW Malaysia KDU Penang University College’s School of Hospitality, Tourism and Culinary Arts since 2009. She has a background in Town and Country Planning and earned her undergraduate degree in this field. She worked as an assistant town planner in a developer company after her graduation in 2004 before furthering her postgraduate studies in 2006. Within pursuing her postgraduate studies, she focused on tourism and in 2008 graduated with a Master’s degree in Tourism Planning. She worked with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia as a research officer for the Tourism Planning Research Group (TPRG) under the supervision of Professor Amran Hamzah from 2006 until 2008, involved in many research projects with the Ministry of Tourism Malaysia and Johor State Government. With these experiences, she then worked as a lecturer for SHTCA, KDU Penang in 2009. In 2010, she pursued her PhD in the same field and completed it in 2014.

Since completing her PhD studies Dr Irhanida has actively participated in tourism research projects with the Ministry of Tourism Malaysia, Penang Island City Council as well as other tourism bodies such as Think City Penang. From 2015 to 2018 she focuses her research in tourism planning and management, which deals with sustainable strategies. This is to ensure a continued supply of tourists, subsequently boosting the local economy. In much of her research, the quantitative research method is employed. In 2019, she was selected to be the research partner for ADUN Bukit Tengah office working with YB Gooi Hsiao Leung to produce interim research for Bukit Juru as an eco-tourism destination. This report was presented to Penang State Government. She was then appointed to be the committee member of the Bukit Juru Development Project. Besides involving herself in research, she is also the Advisory Board Member for SEGi College Penang since 2014 until now. Other than that, she is a certified trainer (obtained her Train the Trainer certificate from HRDF in 2016), the Internal Auditor for MyRA since 2017 and a member of the Malaysia Convention & Exhibition Bureau (MyCEB) since 2020. She is the recipient of the FRGS grant in 2022 with the research title ‘Assessing Potential Tourism Site at Bukit Tengah to Promote Sustainability and Economic Opportunity to the B40 communities- A Weighted Score Method and Principal Component Analysis Approach. She is also one of the recipients of the Global Research Small Grants Scheme, a project that focuses on modelling the impact of COVID-19 on tourism area life cycles. Dr Irhanida is also an active event advisor for many of her students’ event projects that also emphasize sustainability approaches. Currently, she is supervising 3 postgraduate students from UOW Malaysia, all are in the field of tourism planning.