Dr Abena Amoah is Science Programme Manager at MEIRU’s Karonga campus where she has oversight over research activities. Abena holds a PhD in immunoepidemiology from University of Leiden in the Netherlands and an MSc in epidemiology from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her undergraduate training was in biological sciences and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in the United States.

Abena started off her research career as a clinical research assistant at the Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases at Rockefeller University in New York City where she worked for  two years. She then relocated to Ghana where she worked at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research for almost 10 years coordinating population studies that focused on immune responses to parasitic worm (helminth) infections.

Prior to joining MEIRU in 2019, Abena was a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University Medical Center and was part of the project management team for the EDCTP-funded freeBILy project evaluating the accuracy of antigen tests to diagnose Schistosoma infections in women and young children in Gabon and Madagascar.  

She is a member of the International Epidemiology Association (IEA), American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI).

Abena’s research has focused on immune responses to helminths in urban and rural populations and she has an interest in understanding mechanisms underpinning protection against or susceptibility to noncommunicable diseases in populations in Sub-Saharan Africa.