Megan Coffee

Megan Coffee, MD, PhD is on faculty at the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University where she works on developing AI tools to better identify and respond to emerging and neglected diseases in the fog of war of early outbreaks. Her work incorporates mathematical and computational tools into outbreak response. She is an attending physician in infectious diseases at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and teaches on prevention and response to outbreaks globally in low resource settings at Columbia University and on AI and healthcare ethics at the University of Pavia. She is an advisor on communicable diseases at the International Rescue Committee, where she had been involved directly on the ground response and research in humanitarian crises.

Her work has explored the need for representative and diverse data to train and evaluate AI tools, such as for mpox and TB chest X-rays. also explore the development clinical decision support tools to predict disease severity, such as in COVID, while also looking at using machine learning to better recognize disease transmission, vaccine hesitancy and ethics. She is currently working to build a collaboration between universities in the DRC, Burundi, Ghana, Nigeria, and Haiti to improve engagement on and data collection and evaluation of AI tools.

Her work at IRC has included coordinating Ebola clinical and public health response efforts in Sierra Leone and supporting other infectious disease responses, from cholera to Lassa to HIV and TB, including in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Liberia, Kenya, Uganda, and Cote d'Ivoire. She has led research on community and primary health use of antimicrobials and prevention and response to AMR in settings with limited diagnostic access, including Yemen, South Sudan, and in areas of Northeastern Nigeria affected by Boko Haram. In addition, this work will evaluate the use of an mpox detection tool developed in collaboration with researchers in Burundi and the DRC. She also works on the response to climate change affecting outbreaks, by working on anticipatory action programming to predict and proactively respond to climate shocks and their downstream effects on infectious disease outbreaks, including supporting 2023 work in Guatemala. Through the IRC, she has worked with the WHO in Geneva, UN, CDC, US State Department, and other governments. She also supports the development of systems of oxygen logistic and management and telemedicine in resource limited settings.

She is the founder and director of Ti Kay, Inc for over 10 years, supporting healthcare providers and telemedicine options for TB and HIV patients in Haiti after running an HIV/TB ward at the main public hospital in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti with a team of Haitian nurses for 4 years after the earthquake providing care for thousand of patients. This work incorporates building tools using telemedicine, smartphones, and AI to improve program quality and accessibility.

She completed her undergraduate and medical school education at Harvard University and her doctorate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at Oxford University, where she worked on programming mathematical models of infectious disease epidemics, focusing on HIV and population movement in southern Africa, in Professor Roy Anderson's group. She completed her residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and her fellowship in infectious diseases at University of California at San Francisco, with research at UC Berkeley. She also works as a telemedicine doctor around the US.