Dan Kelly, MD, MPH

About

While pursuing a Global Health Fellowship during medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Kelly and a local doctor in Sierra Leone founded Wellbody Alliance, a health and human rights organization providing care to the rural poor. Wellbody served the half-million people of rural Kono district and was severely affected by the 2013–2016 Ebola epidemic.

After a close friend died of Ebola in August 2014, he took leave from his infectious disease fellowship at UCSF and his MPH training at Berkeley to work full-time on the Ebola response in Sierra Leone. He established a coalition with Partners In Health and led work ranging from direct Ebola care to clinical trials of novel diagnostics, integrating Wellbody Alliance into Partners In Health. He returned to the Bay Area once the epidemic was no longer a humanitarian crisis, completing his MPH, his infectious disease fellowship, and a PhD in epidemiology.

He continues Ebola research in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and built a COVID-19 and respiratory viral research program in San Francisco when the 2020 pandemic began. His work identifies treatments for "Long Ebola," evaluates vaccine-induced immune protection against Ebola, and studies the natural history of acute and post-acute COVID-19. At UCSF he leads the Long COVID prevention agenda and the RECOVER observational research project alongside the LIINC leadership team, and runs a large-cohort research program at the San Francisco VA studying vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19, RSV, and other respiratory viruses using target trial emulation and related methods.

Education & Training

AB, Chemistry, 2003 — Princeton University
MD, 2008 — Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Residency, Internal Medicine, 2011 — Baylor College of Medicine
MPH, Epidemiology, 2016 — University of California, Berkeley
DTMH, Tropical Medicine, 2017 — Gorgas Memorial Institute
Fellowship, Infectious Diseases, 2018 — University of California, San Francisco
Postdoctoral Fellow, Prevention Science, 2018 — University of California, San Francisco
PhD, Epidemiology, 2022 — University of California, San Francisco