Professor Hill is Director of the Jenner Institute, which focuses on designing and developing vaccines for infectious diseases prevalent in developing countries, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. He also heads a group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics which studies genetic susceptibility factors for common bacterial diseases. He is a passionate believer in the power of molecular medicine to design and deliver new health care interventions that will improve the lives of the poorest billion in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. His own vaccine research programme has developed one of the most promising potential vaccines for malaria which is currently in large scale trials in infants in sub-Saharan Africa.

 In 2014 his group led the first clinical trial of an Ebola virus vaccine targeting the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.