Dan Kelly, MD

After graduating from Princeton University, Dan Kelly, MD, MPH, 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. After internal medicine residency and with a Fulbright scholarship, Dan conducted HIV research in Sierra Leone while building the community health work of Wellbody Alliance to care for the half million people living in rural Kono district. Dan was an infectious disease fellow at University of California, San Francisco, and an MPH student at University of California, Berkeley, when Ebola struck Sierra Leone. After a close friend died of Ebola in August 2014, Dan decided to take a leave of absence from fellowship training and the MPH to take a full-time leadership role in the Ebola response. Dan reached out to his long-time mentor Paul Farmer and established a coalition with Partners In Health in Sierra Leone. Dan spent eight months on the ground in Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic and led multiple frontiers of work, ranging from Ebola care to clinical trials of innovative Ebola diagnostics, and integrated Wellbody Alliance into Partners In Health. Dan returned to UCSF and UCB and finished his infectious disease fellowship and MPH. Dan continues to conduct Ebola research in Sierra Leone and Liberia. He employs sero-epidemiology, transmission mapping and modeling techniques, and clinical research cohorts to investigate asymptomatic Ebola virus infection and mild illness. Dan has published on Ebola in New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and The Lancet.