Dan Kelly, MD
After graduating from Princeton University, Dan Kelly, MD MPH PhD, went to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he pursued a Global Health Fellowship after his third year. In Sierra Leone, a local doctor and he were inspired to start Wellbody Alliance, a health and human rights non-profit organization that provides high-quality healthcare to the rural poor. Wellbody Alliance cared for the half million people living in rural Kono district and was severely affected by the 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic.
After a close friend died of Ebola in August 2014, Dan decided to take a leave of absence from infectious disease fellowship at UCSF and his MPH training at Berkeley to focus full-time on the Ebola response in Sierra Leone. Dan reached out to his long-time mentor Paul Farmer and established a coalition with Partners In Health in Sierra Leone. Dan led multiple frontiers of work, ranging from Ebola care to clinical trials of innovative Ebola diagnostics, and integrated Wellbody Alliance into Partners In Health. After the Ebola epidemic was no longer a humanitarian crisis, Dan returned from Sierra Leone to the San Francisco Bay Area and finished his MPH at Berkeley as well as his infectious disease fellowship and PhD in epidemiology at UCSF.
Dan continues to conduct Ebola research in Sierra Leone and Liberia and pivoted to incorporate COVID-19 research when the 2020 pandemic hit, developing a robust COVID-19 and respiratory viral research program in San Francisco. Dan uses his clinical and epidemiological research training to identify treatments for "Long Ebola" and to prevent future pandemics through evaluations of vaccine-induced immune protection against Ebola. Dan studies the natural history of acute and post-acute COVID-19, including "Long COVID". At UCSF, Dan leads the "Long COVID" prevention agenda and RECOVER observational research project (NIH consortium) in collaboration with others on the LIINC leadership team. Dan also has a robust "big data" research program at the SFVA using national cohorts to study vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19, RSV, and other respiratory viral infections using target trial emulation and other modern epidemiological methods. Overall, these research projects aim to prevent, treat, and discover cures for viral infections with pandemic potential.
Dan has published this high-impact work on Ebola and/or COVID-19 in New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, The Lancet, Annuals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA.