Michelle Kendall

I work across two CEPI-funded projects: PRESTO and RVF-VETS. PRESTO aims to optimise the implementation of vaccine efficacy trials in the event of an emerging epidemic. The RVF-VETS project is working to assess the impact of Rift Valley Fever across Africa and, accordingly, how best to implement vaccine efficacy trials.

Previously I was involved in the motivation, design, maintenance and evaluation of the NHS COVID-19 app. A summary of the work can be found here. For this work I was based first at the Oxford Big Data Institute and then in the Health Protection Research Unit in Genomics and Enabling Data at the University of Warwick, working closely with NHS Test and Trace and the UK Health Security Agency.

Since its decommission in April 2023, I have continued to be involved in extracting epidemiological insights from the anonymised NHS COVID-19 app data and advocating for the use of Digital Contact Tracing for mitigation and monitoring of future epidemics. 

My first PostDoc was in the biomathematics group at Imperial College London with Caroline Colijn, where we developed methods and software for comparing evolutionary trees.

My PhD was in Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, with Keith Martin. I used combinatorial and probabilistic methods to answer questions about how to distribute cryptographic keys to secure networks of small devices.