DrCecile Tran Kiem

I am an infectious disease modeller and genomic epidemiologist. I am a Research Fellow in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, supported by a Wellcome Early Career Award. You can find detailed information about my work on my personal website. 

My research centres on developing mathematical and statistical methods to understand how pathogens spread and to support their control, using epidemiological, genomic and behavioural data. In particular, I have focused on characterising transmission patterns between groups such as age groups, geographical areas and vaccination status, and using this information to evaluate targeted interventions.

A central challenge is that we rarely observe transmission events. Much of my recent work addresses this using pathogen genomes: because closely related infections carry nearly identical genomes, clusters of closely related sequences contain information about transmission patterns. Using this signal directly rather than reconstructing full phylogenies makes it possible to analyse very large pathogen sequence datasets. I will soon be recruiting to work on these questions. If you’re interested, please get in touch!

Prior to joining Imperial, I completed a postdoc in the Bedford Lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (Seattle) and a PhD in the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases Unit at Institut Pasteur (Paris).