Rachel McKendry

Rachel Anne McKendry is a British chemist. She is Director of i-sense, a UK-based interdisciplinary research collaboration developing early warning sensing systems for infectious diseases, and was part of the UK's Cross Council Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance. McKendry is also Professor of Biomedical Nanoscience at University College London, holding a joint appointment in the Division of Medicine and the London Centre for Nanotechnology.

McKendry studied chemistry at Durham University (Trevelyan College), graduating in 1994. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1999 and won a Girton College, Cambridge Research Fellowship in 1998.

After working as a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, McKendry returned to the UK to take up a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship, and to work at University College London.

McKendry leads an interdisciplinary research team at the intersection of nanotechnology, telecommunications, big data, infectious diseases and public health. In 2015, she presented a Tedx Talk in Exeter on "The Digital Future of Public Health", in which she discussed early warning systems for disease outbreaks – from SARS to Ebola – being developed along the lines of Google Flu Trends, based on anonymised social media chatter from the world's many billion users of smartphones and other digital devices.

She has published many research papers in Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Materials and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Recent research highlights include nanodiamond quantum materials for ultra-sensitive virus detection, cantilever nanosensors for phenotypic detection of antimicrobial resistance, and deep learning to support quality assurance and decision support of rapid field-based tests. McKendry also led a review of digital technologies in the global public health response to COVID-19.

McKendry is Director of i-Sense, a large interdisciplinary research collaboration set up in 2013 to develop early warning sensing systems for infectious diseases, and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council with a total investment of £11 million (renewed from 2018).

In 2009 McKendry was awarded the Institute of Physics Clifford Paterson Medal and Prize.