Vice President for Health Sciences
Dr. Bernice T. Dahn is the Vice President for Health Sciences at the University of Liberia (UL). She served as the Minister of Health for the Republic of Liberia from 2015-2018. For almost nine years prior, Dr. Dahn served as Liberia’s Deputy Minister of Health and Chief Medical Officer (CMO). Having completed medical school at UL and taught medical students there for thirteen years, Dr. Dahn is now focused on improving academic and administrative systems across the University of Liberia College of Health Sciences, where she has established new schools of Public Health and Midwifery while reforming curricula and training pathways for doctors and pharmacists.
Dr. Bernice T. Dahn is the Vice President for Health Sciences at the University of Liberia. She served as the Minister of Health for the Republic of Liberia from 2015-2018. For almost nine years prior, Dr. Dahn served as the Deputy Minister of Health and Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for the Republic of Liberia. In these roles, Dr. Dahn led the re-establishment of the Ministry of Health and the rebuilding of Liberia’s post-conflict health care delivery system. Internationally, Dr. Dahn has served as a Board Member of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and of the World Bank’s Global Financing Facility. In her current role, she oversees Liberia’s sole medical school and pharmacy school as well as schools of public health and midwifery established during her tenure.
Dr. Dahn has been a resolute advocate for donor alignment to government-led plans and for mutual transparency and accountability in aid relationships and led a paradigm shift from NGO-controlled resources to government leadership in the health sector. As CMO, she negotiated the Fixed Amount Reimbursement Agreement with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United States’ first direct government-to-government funding mechanism, successfully instituting an innovative approach to bilateral development aid in Liberia. She also built County Health Teams’ capacity for managing donor funds (contracting in and out health services by the MOH), giving the Government of Liberia more ownership of its development agendas.
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In 2013, Dr. Dahn spearheaded the establishment of postgraduate medical residency programs in general surgery, pediatrics, internal medicine, and obstetrics & gynecology. During the early stages of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in 2014, Dr. Dahn coordinated the national response to the epidemic, including development of treatment protocols and infection prevention and control standards, trainings, resource mobilization, and partner coordination. Upon establishment of the Incident Management System, she focused on community-based initiatives and restoration of routine health services. Dr. Dahn also led the development of Liberia’s Investment Plan for Building a Resilient Health System, including the National Health Workforce Program. She also launched a National Community Health Services Policy (2016), creating a new cadre of Community Health Assistants, and permanently transitioning Liberia’s community health system from a series of fragmented, under-performing community health volunteer programs to a nationally unified and high-quality Community Health Assistant program.
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At the end of the Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf administration in 2018, Dr. Dahn transitioned to lead the College of Health Sciences at nation’s flagship University of Liberia (ULCHS). This move would allow her to continue building on the Health Workforce Program investments from Liberia’s epicenter of health workforce training, including the country’s sole medical school and pharmacy school.
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She began by establishing a School of Public Health in 2019, delivering rigorous curricula – informed by the country’s experiences with Ebola – at both the bachelor’s and master’s degree levels. She convened partners to create and implement the medical school’s first strategic plan, which included reforming the MD pathway and designing a new competency-based curriculum. In 2021, Dr. Dahn and partners at Yale University were awarded the USAID-funded BRIDGE-U: Liberia grant to establish ULCHS’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation. This Center has institutionalized faculty trainings in pedagogy and mentorship, implemented a secondary school science camp to support more females and students from rural areas to pursue higher education in the health sciences, created a health innovation and entrepreneurship program, and launched Liberia’s first ever high-fidelity clinical simulation lab.
Dr. Dahn has continued her career of building systems for self-reliance and resilience at the University of Liberia by establishing an Office of Fiduciary Services and Office of Sponsored Research Services at ULCHS, allowing the College to compete for, obtain, and successfully manage externally-funded projects and research grants. As of 2025, two consecutive annual external audits have confirmed the integrity and transparency of ULCHS’s financial systems. Building on these new capabilities, Dr. Dahn is working towards cementing ULCHS as a leading health sciences research institution in West Africa. To-date, ULCHS faculty have received 25 research grants, totaling $14.5 million.
In 2022, Dr. Dahn opened UL’s School of Midwifery, Liberia’s only public Bachelor’s-degree level midwifery training program, creating a new platform for career development for Liberia’s midwives. Her vision is to expand the school to provide a bachelor’s-level nursing degree and master’s level specialization pathways. In 2025, she launched an undergraduate medical laboratory science degree program, continuing to fill gaps in the pipeline for Liberia’s fit-for-purpose health workforce.
Leading ULCHS with the vision that it will be home to a set of internationally-accredited training programs that produce the fit-for-purpose workforce that Liberia needs, Dr. Dahn now looks forward to new opportunities in PhD-level training, dentistry training, and continuing to forge new paths in the development of Liberia’s health system.​​