Manuela Rehr, PhD MScPH

I am a microbiologist and epidemiologist working at the intersection of global health and AI.

I spent >16 years in international public health as epidemiologist and laboratory specialist with Médecins Sans Frontières, as a diagnostics senior technical officer with KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation, and as an independent consultant for USAID, FIND, and others.

My global health work focuses on geospatial optimization of access to health care and diagnostics, with country-level projects across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. 

As my heart is always with open-source work, I developed and open-sourced the Diagnostic Network Explorer geospatial analysis app and published a multi-country accessibility analysis for novel TB diagnostics across 11 countries in East and Southern Africa.

In 2025, I started teaching myself machine learning, transformer architecture and mechanistic interpretability. My first research project examined how the name “Mary Mallon” (Typhoid Mary) biases Llama 3.1 8B’s decisions in a fictional outbreak scenario.

I’m now working on investigating user awareness and biases in AI capability evaluations for biosecurity tasks.

I hold an MSc in Chemistry from the University of Marburg, a PhD in Natural Sciences from the ETH Zurich and a postgrad MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.