Home | Michelle Kendall

About me

As a Senior Researcher in Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford, I work in Professor Christophe Fraser's group addressing public health concerns from infectious diseases.

I advocate for equitable and effective public health solutions across two key projects:
1. optimising vaccine efficacy trials for CEPI priority pathogens,
2. digital public health and digital pandemic preparedness with the Oxford Martin School.

My research includes developing data pipelines and designing reproducible open-source analysis, and maximising impact by driving inter-disciplinary collaboration and producing user-friendly outputs such as software, visualisations, interactive dashboards and plain English summaries.

I am part of the core team shaping the new Digital Public Health Foundation. We look forward to sharing more details soon.

Previously

From early 2020 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.