Philip Hill

Professor Philip Hill holds separate qualifications as a medical practitioner (MBChB), specialist public health physician (MPH; FAFPHM; FNZCPHM), specialist infectious diseases physician (FRACP), as well as a doctorate in the epidemiology of tuberculosis in The Gambia (MD). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ). After completing specialty training in New Zealand, he spent 6 years working as a clinical epidemiologist at the Medical Research Council (UK) research unit in The Gambia, working on tuberculosis (TB) and pneumonia projects.

Professor Hill is the first holder of the McAuley Chair in International Health and is Founding Director and Co-Director of the Centre for International Health at the University of Otago. He is involved in research projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and the Pacific. He is also Adjunct Professor in the new Communicable Diseases Research Centre at the Fiji National University. His major collaboration is in TB research with the TB-HIV research centre of the University of Padjadjaran, Bandung, Indonesia.The collaboration has a large programme of interdisciplinary work across the range of issues from public health through to basic science.  

Professor Hill has published around 300 articles in peer reviewed journals. His research interests include studies of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and disease, Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage, disease and vaccination. Professor Hill has been a Lead or Co-Investigator on grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MRC (UK), European Commission, DFID (UK), The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, The European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership, and Australasian funders.

Professor Hill has a special interest in training people from low resource settings at masters’ and PhD level, with a view to them becoming internationally competitive academic leaders back in their home country. He has supervised over 30 masters’ and PhD students, who have had a very high completion and publication rate.