Dr. Jerry Hella is an epidemiologist and a public health specialist working at the Tuberculosis Research group at the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI). He has a background in clinical medicine (MD) and holds a PhD. in Epidemiology from the University of Basel and Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute.

Currently, Dr. Hella serves as the acting Head of the Interventions and Clinical Trials Department at Ifakara Health Institute.

Dr. Hella began his career in research in 2012 as a study doctor at IHI and since then he has participated in different clinical research activities in Tanzania. He has extensive experience on data management ranging from database creation (OpenDataKit, EpiData, EpiInfo, SurveyMonkey, Ms. Access, MySQL etc.), data management and analyses using different platforms such as Stata and R. He is passionate about geo-spatial analysis and modelling of infectious disease. His publication list can be found here.

Over the years, Dr. Hella has presided over a number of research projects at Ifakara both as a Principal Investigator and a Co-Principal Investigator. Some of the projects include a TB cohort study in Dar es Salaam region, A prospective collection of clinical data and biological specimens to study the epidemiology of TB, including molecular epidemiology, immunology and the evaluation of new diagnostics and biomarkers (TB DAR); Improving TB case finding among people living with HIV/AIDS in HIV clinics in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: An operational research (TB ACF); A multicenter, phase III, double-blind, randomized, active-controlled study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of VPM1002 in comparison to BCG in prevention of TB infection in newborn infants (VPM1002); and Prospective multicenter evaluation of the accuracy and diagnostic yield of the Fujifilm SILVAMP TB LAM test for the diagnosis of TB in people living with HIV (FujiLAM).