Our Team
We are a dynamic group of researchers specialising in AMR, from five universities, the NHS, the UK Health Security Agency, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, charities and industry partners. Our Co-Investigators work across traditional disciplines for AMR, including computer science, data visualisation, biomedical engineering, behavioural science, environmental science, clinical and public health research:
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Prof Rachel McKendry
Prof Rachel McKendry (Director) is the Director of the Digital Health Hub for AMR and holds a joint appointment at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Division of Medicine, UCL. She was previously Director of the i-sense EPSRC IRC in Early Warning Sensing Systems for Infectious Diseases (2013-24). She chaired the UK Biosurveillance Network Advisory Group, co-chaired the Digital Medicine Theme of the NHS Topol Review, served on the steering group of the UK Cross Council Programme for AMR and the International Pandemic Preparedness 100 Days Mission Diagnostics Scientific and Technical Advisory Group.
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Prof Ingemar Cox
Prof Ingemar Cox (Deputy Director) is head of the Information and Decision Systems group in UCL Computer Science and a Professor at the University of Copenhagen. He was i-sense Deputy Director and with Lampos, developed models that have been adopted by the UK Health Security Agency for national COVID-19 and influenza surveillance, the first UK example of machine learning models adopted for public health. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, IET and BCS, recipient of the international Tony Kent Strix Prize for Information Retrieval, holds 72 US patents, has a h-index of 82, has 18 years’ experience working for industry (US), and was co-founder and CTO of a spin-out company.
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Dr Colin Brown
Dr Colin Brown (Deputy Director) is an infectious diseases clinician and public health microbiologist at UKHSA. He co-leads the £1.3M Imperial healthcare-associated infection (HCAI) / AMR Health Protection Research Unit, is the organisational guarantor for the annual HCAI/AMR Division £5.5M budget, and oversees the £10M UKHSA National AMR Action Plan, coordinating 2022-23 Directorate spending review of £15M. He co-leads the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on AMR and HCAI.
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Prof Laura Shallcross
Prof Laura Shallcross (Deputy Director) is a Professor of Public Health and Translational Data Science at the Institute of Health Informatics and Honorary Consultant in Public Health in the Division of Infection at University College London Hospital NHS Trust. She is a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Antimicrobial Prescribing, Resistance and Healthcare Acquired Infection (APRHAI) and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) Social Care working group and led a major study of COVID-19 in >100 care homes (VIVALDI).
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Prof Davey Jones
Prof Davey Jones (Deputy Director) is a Professor of Environmental Science at Bangor University and has expertise in understanding the behaviour and fate of microbial pathogens and AMR in wastewater systems and the use of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) for public and environmental health surveillance. He helped set up the UK national WBE-COVID-19 surveillance programme, and currently leads the Welsh WBE programme for pathogens in the environment.
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Prof Andrew Singer
Prof Andrew Singer (Deputy Director) is a Principal Scientist at the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology (UK CEH). He is an environmental microbiologist with expertise in pollutant chemistry and water quality modelling. He led the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) UKRI-funded National COVID-19 WBE Surveillance Programme, served as Chair of the Expert Advisory Group for COVID-19 and Technical Lead at the Home Office: Accelerated Capability Environment, is a member of the Animal and Environment AMR Delivery Group for Wales and the PATH-SAFE Science Advisory Group.
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Russell Hope
Russell Hope has 18 years’ experience in surveillance of healthcare-associated infection and AMR in UK Health Security Agency. He is currently working as an epidemiologist leading national HCAI surveillance programmes.
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Jo McHugh
Jo McHugh (Hub Project Manager) is an experienced project manager based at the London Centre for Nanotechnology UCL, with a track record managing large multidisciplinary, multi-centre programmes, including the i-sense EPSRC IRC and a Centre Manager role at Imperial College. Jo is a Prince 2 and AGILE qualified project manager with an intermediate diploma in human resource management from the Chartered Institute of Personel Management.
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Prof Ed Manley
Prof Ed Manley is a Professor of Urban Analytics at the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, University of Leeds, and an honorary lecturer at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and the Alan Turing Institute Fellow. He co-developed the i-sense Africa Health Research Institute dashboard and is Co-I of SAFER, responsible for the dashboards and wearables pilot.
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Prof Molly Stevens
Prof Molly Stevens FREng FRS is a John Black Professor of Bionanoscience at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics, and Deputy Director of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery at the University of Oxford. She is an international leader in biosensing technologies and regenerative medicine, publishes extensively and has significant expertise and experience in commercialisation of devices.
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Dr Mengdie Zhuang
Dr Mengdie Zhuang is a Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on Data Visualisation and Human Computer Interaction.
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Prof James Hetherington
Prof James Hetherington is the Director of UCL Advanced Research Computing. Previously, he was Director of Research Engineering at the Alan Turing Institute, along with several other roles including Chief Data Science Advisor at the Joint Biosecurity Centre during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Director of Digital Research Infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation.
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Prof Steven Gray
Prof Steven Gray is an Associate Professor of Spatial Computation at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (Director of Teaching) and an Alan Turing Institute Fellow. He co-leads Turing's Tools, Practices and Systems programme, is a Google Developer Expert for Google Cloud & Maps, Google Cloud Champion Innovator for Data Analytics, Modern Architecture and Machine Learning.
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Prof Eleni Nastouli
Prof Eleni Nastouli is a Professor of Virology at UCL and Director of the UCL Hospital Advanced Pathogen Diagnostics Unit introducing novel diagnostics to clinical practice. She is the PI of SAFER, the comprehensive healthcare worker study.
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Dr Fabiana Lorencatto
Dr Fabiana Lorencatto is the Research Lead at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change. Fabiana's research focuses on implementation science and health behaviour change. She leads the behavioural science work packages of several national and international programmes of AMR research, collaborating with stakeholders from a wide range of academic, policy and practice backgrounds.
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Dr Jo Gibbs
Dr Jo Gibbs is a Senior Clinical Research Associate and Honorary Consultant in Sexual Health and HIV and leads on Digital Health for Infectious Diseases at UCL. Her research interests include digital health, health service delivery and public health.
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Assoc Prof Vasileios Lampos
Assoc Prof Vasileios Lampos is an Associate Professor at UCL Computer Science. His main interest is in developing machine learning and natural language processing methods for addressing health-related tasks. His models for influenza and COVID-19 based on web search activity have been adopted by the UK’s Health Security Agency.
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Felix Donaldson
Felix Donaldson is a physicist and Postdoctoral Research Associate at UCL London Centre for Nanotechnology working with Professor Rachel McKendry. Felix has a PhD in quantum physics from UCL and is working on a new Hub Grand Challenge research exemplar project between the McKendry group and Professor Davey Jones (Bangor), exploring the use of near-source quantum enhanced sensors for AMR wastewater-based epidemiology.
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Dr Kata Farkas
Dr Kata Farkas is a Research Fellow at Bangor University. Her research focuses on the ecology and survival of viruses in the aquatic environment. Dr Farkas designs and validates methods for the recovery of enteric viruses in the aquatic environment in order to quantify infectious viruses, understand viral ecology, describe novel and emerging strains and model viral transport in the environment.
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Dr Nic Elviss
Dr Nic Elviss is Interim Deputy Director of UKHSA Colindale Site and National Standards, Quality and Safety Division UKHSA. She is a Food Examiner and her substantive role is Head of Operations for the Food, Water and Environmental Microbiology Services.
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Dr Alicia Demirjian
Dr Alicia Demirjian is a consultant in paediatric infectious diseases and immunology at Evelina London Children’s Hospital, Guy’s and St. Thomas’, where she is the lead for paediatric antimicrobial stewardship and deputy lead for infection prevention and control. She is also a consultant epidemiologist in the UKHSA Healthcare-Associated Infection and Antimicrobial Resistance division.
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Dr Sarah Gerver
Dr Sarah Gerver is a UKHSA Senior Scientist (Epidemiology) for the sentinel scheme for CVC-blood stream infections in intensive care units in England.
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Steve Harris
Steve Harris is a Principal Research Fellow in Translational Data Science at UCL, an Honorary NHS Critical Care Consultant, and the Chief Research Information Officer at UCLH. He has held fellowships from Wellcome, and the Health Foundation, and won more than £5m in grant funding (UCLH Charity, EPSRC, NIHR/NHS-X) in the last 5 years. He is a co-investigator in the NIHR Patient Safety Research Collaborative, CHIMERA, the Wellcome Innovation Flagship Critical Care Asia, and co-leads the NIHR Health Informatics Collaborative for Critical Care. At UCLH, he led the implementation of the Experimental Medicine Application Platform (EMAP) and FlowEHR that aim to bridge the 'AI chasm', and deliver algorithms and inference to the bedside.
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Dr Chris Whittleston
Dr Chris Whittleston is the Senior Delivery Manager for Health and Biosecurity at Faculty, bridging the technical and non-technical elements of delivering impactful AI solutions in the real world across the full range of UK Public Services. He has led a number of large and complex science and healthcare projects, including work with the NHS AI Lab and DHSC to accelerate the NHS’s work on the safe deployment of mature and certified AI medical imaging products at national scale. Chris jointly led the creation of the NHS Covid-19 data store, owning development of the tools that provided the single source of truth for the state of the health service during Covid for NHS exec, regional EPRR teams, CCS and No.10 via COBR. Chris is currently the Science Lead for the Alpha phase of UKHSA’s National Biosurveillance Network programme, aiming to protect the UK’s national security from known and emerging high-consequence biological threats.