Megan Coffee

Megan Coffee MD, PhD (DPhil) is an attending physician at Bellevue hospital and assistant professor at NYU. She additionally teaches a course in communicable diseases in humanitarian disasters at Columbia University.

Megan Coffee completed her undergraduate and medical degrees at Harvard University and her doctoral degree at Oxford University. Her doctoral thesis was on the ‘The Epidemiology of HIV in Southern Africa” and focused on mathematical modeling of the impact of migration and other co-factors on HIV spread. She completed her medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and her Infectious Disease Fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). During her fellowship, she did research at Berkeley and was there working on influenza modelling when the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010.

After going to Port-Au-Prince in January 2010, she and a group of Haitian nurses re-opened the TB outpatient clinic and established a TB inpatient ward (that had up to 70 inpatients, many of whom were critically ill) at the main public hospital until 2014. She continues to remain involved and directs a nonprofit Ti Kay, Inc that has supported TB and HIV patients.

In 2014, she went to Sierra Leone with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) where she oversaw the opening and running of IRC supported Ebola Isolation Units. She has continued to work with the IRC as a communicable disease advisor. With the IRC, she has worked primarily in West Africa but has worked in or visited a number of countries with IRC programs from Lebanon to Uganda.