Rachel McKendry

Early life and education

McKendry was born in London, the daughter of an engineer and a civil servant. She went to a comprehensive school before studying chemistry at Durham University, where she achieved a First Class Honours degree. She gained her PhD at Cambridge University in 1999, and won a Girton College Research Fellowship in 1998.

Early career

After working as a post-doctoral researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, McKendry returned to the UK in 2001 to take up the Royal Society's Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship and work at University College London.

Current research focus

McKendry says she is most proud of her Interdisciplinary research team and breakthroughs in nanosensors for antibiotic drug discovery and early disease diagnosis. In 2015, she presented a Ted^x 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 Smart Phones and other digital devices.

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

In 2008, writing in Nature Nanotechnology with colleagues from labs in the UK, Kenya and Australia, she showed how nano-sensors could 'feel' mechanical stresses in the cell walls of bacteria when the antibiotic Vancomycin attaches to them. Vancomycin was used in the study as it is one of the last powerful antibiotics in the battle against resistant bacteria and the 'hospital superbug' ... MRSA the paper explained. Nanosensors used in the study showed that it was approximately 1,000 times harder for Vancomycin to attach to the cell walls of antibiotic-resistant 'Superbugs.' Understanding the process by which Vancomycin attaches (or fails to attach) to bacterial walls and weakens or kills bacteria, led researchers in this study to suggest other, potentially more effective alternatives compounds worthy of investigation.

In 2014, also in Nature Nanotechnology, McKendry, and her co-workers, Joseph Ndieyira et al, used nano sensors to test a theoretical approach to personalised antibiotic treatment for individual patients of the future. Their prototype nano-mechanical sensors measured the amount of antibiotic freely available to target bacteria in human blood plasma, which contains serum proteins that also bind weakly to antibiotics, neutralising their effect against bacteria. This study mimicked an aspect of the complex physiology of human blood in a living patient. and was used to compare effectiveness of a novel antibiotic, oritavancin with the older antibiotic, vancomycin (which is threatened by evolving antimicrobial resistance). 'Perhaps the most obvious diagnostic application,' the researchers concluded 'is to measure the active free drug availability in blood for a particular medical target and thereby determine appropriate doses tailored for individualised patients.'

Such basic scientific advances are among those required for the future of smart phone-based, low cost, rapid-result infectious disease test kits of the kind McKendry described in her 2015 TEDx talk. "The grand challenge now," said McKendry in a Nature Nanotechnology News and Views article in 2015, "will be to integrate nanosensors onto... cost-effective point-care devices that can examine clinically problematic bacteria in a variety of community settings, including doctors surgeries and developing countries."

Membership of panels

• On the Steering Group of the Infectious Diseases Research Network, a mainly UK-based collaborative research project which ran between 2002 and 2015 and sought to reduce the toll of infectious diseases on the NHS, especially tuberculosis, health care associated infection, antimicrobial resistance, hepatitis, and sexually transmitted infections.
• Part of the UK Government's Blackett Review Panel on Biological Detection which published its report in February 2014, identifying a number of technologies and capabilities that could improve government's ability to detect and respond to an airborne biological attack or infectious disease outbreak.
• Formerly an expert to the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology

Awards

In 2014 McKendry received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, to assist her study of 'New Paradigms in Connected Global Health for Infectious Diseases.'

In 2014, she received a Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her 'scientific achievements, her suitability as a role model and for her exciting proposal to launch a national competition to create mobile phone apps to inspire women to become leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)'.

Personal life

Rachel McKendry is married to the health economist Torsten Strunz-McKendry and has two children. She has worked part-time for much of her career.

At Cambridge, McKendry was a member of the University Women's Boat Club and in 1997 was part of its winning 'Blondie' crew, beating Oxford's Osiris team.