UCLA Magazine | "A mission that’s going global"
UCLA Magazine profiled the work of UCLA Fielding's Dr. Anne Rimoin and Dr. Nicole Hoff, who study the ebola virus in Central Africa.
In the spring, 2026 edition of UCLA Magazine, writer Robert Huber focused on student civic engagement and faculty mentorship, including the work of UCLA Fielding faculty and staff overseas and featuring the research work of Dr. Anne Rimoin and Dr. Nicole Hoff on the ebola virus in Central Africa.
Rimoin, professor in the Department of Epidemiology, and Hoff, an assistant professor, were both referenced, and Hoff was quoted.
" ... UCLA researchers Anne Rimoin M.P.H. ’96 and Nicole Hoff Ph.D. ’14 of the Fielding School of Public Health have conducted pioneering studies on ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — a program Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology, started in 2004 — focusing on vaccine efficacy and survivor immunity.
Hoff was a graduate student working toward a doctorate in epidemiology when she took an offer from Rimoin to go to the Congo almost two decades ago.
In 2016, the pair managed to locate 14 survivors of a 1976 Ebola outbreak in Équateur Province. In the remote area of dense forests and limited resources, including sketchy electricity, it wasn’t easy to build a mobile lab where blood samples had to be frozen to minus 80 degrees with no power disruptions.
The study revealed that the survivors’ immune systems had given them long-term protection, which could become instrumental in the development of new vaccines and treatment.
' We spend a lot of time thinking about how to appropriately work with populations that could be seen as marginalized, that could easily be taken advantage of,' Hoff says. 'Taking the time to hear people’s stories and understanding them — that’s how this research can happen. These aren’t things that we’ve ever gotten in a classroom.' "
