Home | Michelle Kendall

About me

I am a Senior Researcher in the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford, working in Dr Luca Ferretti's group on Precision Infectious Disease Epidemiology.

I develop statistical methods and software for public health protection using large scale genomic and epidemiological data. From early 2020 I was involved in the motivation, design, maintenance and evaluation of the NHS COVID-19 app. Since its decommission in April 2023, I have continued to be involved in extracting epidemiological insights from its anonymised data and advocating for the use of digital contact tracing for mitigation and monitoring of future epidemics.

Previously

I was a Research Fellow in the Health Protection Research Unit in Genomics and Enabling Data at the University of Warwick. Before that I was a Senior Researcher in statistical genetics and pathogen dynamics at the Oxford Big Data Institute in Christophe Fraser's group, working on HIV and then COVID-19.

My first PostDoc position 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.