Rachel McKendry

Talk: Re-imagining the future of early disease diagnosis

Professor Rachel McKendry is Professor of Biomedicine and Nanotechnology at UCL, and holds a joint appointment between the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Division of Medicine. Her research focuses on early disease diagnosis and is at the cutting edge of quantum technologies, deep learning, mHealth, medicine and public health. She is Director of the EPSRC Digital Health Hub for Antimicrobial Resistance (2023-26), Co-Director of the new £24M Q-BIOMED Quantum Biomedical Sensing Research Hub and was previously the Director of the i-sense EPSRC IRC programme in Early Warning Systems for Infectious Diseases.

Professor McKendry has won several awards for her research including the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award, Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the Institute of Physics Paterson Medal, UCL Provost Spirit of Enterprise Award, Grant Thornton 100 Faces of a Vibrant Economy, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) A F Harvey International Engineering Research Prize 2023 and Cornforth Award 2024. She has held a number of senior Advisory Roles: she chaired the UK Biosurveillance Network Advisory Group, co-chaired the Digital Medicine Theme of the NHS Topol Review 'Preparing the Healthcare Workforce to Deliver the Digital Future’, served on the steering group of the UK Cross Council Programme for AMR, as well as advising the World Health Organisation and the International Pandemic Preparedness 100 Days Mission Scientific and Technical Advisory Group for Diagnostics.

Professor McKendry collaborates widely with leading national and international academic, clinical, public health and industry partners, including UCL, Imperial, Oxford, Cambridge, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, the NHS, UCLH, GOSH, the UK Health Security Agency, Africa Health Research Institute, Uganda Virus Research Institute, CESHHAR Zimbabwe, Google and Microsoft.