Nicole Hoff
Nicole Hoff is the Kinshasa, DRC based country director and a senior administrative analyst within the UCLA-DRC Research Program at UCLA. Nicole earned her B.A. in Biology and Sociology, followed by a MPH in Epidemiology from Tulane University. Focusing in global health and infectious disease, She earned a PhD in Epidemiology from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in 2014.
Nicole has been primarily based in DRC for the last 5 years where she works closely with and have established relationships with the Ministry of Health (MOH), the Institute National de Recherche Biomedical (INRB), and the Kinshasa School of Public Health (KSPH). Her past research evaluated the country’s monkeypox surveillance system, the result of which provided recommendations for improvements in reporting. Most notably, Nicole has worked in collaboration with both the Congolese government and MOH as a supervisor for the 2013 Demographics and Health Survey (DHS), to which our research group (UCLA-DRC) contributed the first population-wide serological survey for vaccine preventable diseases for the DRC. Our collaborations with Congolese government have since continued as she has supervised and worked on a number of the National Immunization Program activities, including supervising mass campaigns, conducting post-vaccination studies, and evaluating disease surveillance programs. Nicole currently manage the day-to-day activities for the following projects: estimation of population immunity to vaccine preventable diseases; isolation of Ebola-reactive human antibody research; and evaluation and supervision of the National Trypanosomiasis Program.
Education
- PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
- MPH, Epidemiology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
- BA, Biology and Sociology, Hood College, Frederick, MD