Infectious disease professor awarded prestigious engineering prize

A senior UCL researcher leading a new generation of tools and technologies for infectious disease surveillance, testing and care has been awarded the Institution of Engineering and Technology's (IET) top A F Harvey Engineering Research Prize worth £350,000. Rachel McKendry (UCL London Centre for Nanotechnology and UCL Division of Medicine) is Professor of Biomedicine and Nanotechology and Director of the i-sense EPSRC IRC in Early Warning Sensing Systems for Infectious Diseases. Her research lies at the cutting edge of quantum technologies, deep learning and telecommunications for infectious diseases and public health. During the pandemic Professor McKendry led the i-sense team to help tackle a range of infections from HIV to the global response to COVID-19, developing new diagnostics and analysing data for public health surveillance. She is also working to transform the ability to accurately interpret HIV results with the use of 'nanodiamonds', which have heightened sensitivity to detect virus proteins in blood and urine - and would advance the results of current PCR tests. Professor McKendry hopes to use the £350,000 prize to utilise her team's recent breakthroughs with nanodiamond diagnostics to revolutionise the early diagnosis of antimicrobial resistance. If successful, this ground-breaking early-stage research could lay the foundations of next stage translational funding, and open up applications to other communicable and non-communicable diseases.