About Heidi Albert

Heidi Albert obtained a Bachelor of Pharmacy and Pharmacology Honours degree and a PhD at the University of Bath, UK, before moving into a research career in diagnostics. She has more than 20 years of experience in TB diagnostics development and implementation in low resource settings. She completed a Masters of Public Health, specializing in Health Economics, at the University of Cape Town.

Heidi joined FIND in 2007 to oversee demonstration projects for rapid screening of multidrug-resistant TB in South Africa. In 2008, she moved to Uganda to establish FIND’s Diagnostics Research Laboratory based at the National TB Reference Laboratory in Kampala, and conducted studies aimed at improving and simplifying specimen processing, as well as clinical studies of new technologies, including LED fluorescence microscopy, line probe assays and Xpert MTB/RIF.

From 2012-2016 she was the Principal Investigator for FIND’s CDC-funded Cooperative agreement, “Building Global Capacity for Diagnostic Testing of Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV through Laboratory Strengthening and Integration of Services” under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR operating in 13 countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

She served on the Core Group of the Global Laboratory Initiative, a working group of the Stop TB Partnership from 2014-2018 and on the GLI Africa regional core group, and has been a lead contributor to multiple global and national TB diagnostic guidelines and tools. She currently leads work on Networks for Optimized Diagnosis (NODE), a data-driven network design approach to inform national strategic planning and donor investments, including development of open access software for use across multiple diseases.