Sir Kenneth Mather Memorial Prize 2025 Noémie Lefrancq

The Genetics Society is delighted to announce Dr Noémie Lefrancq as the winner of the 2025 Sir Kenneth Mather Memorial Prize.

Noémie studied biology at École Normale Supérieure Paris and the mathematics of modelling at Sorbonne Université Paris. After working as a research assistant at Institut Pasteur Paris, she joined the University of Cambridge in 2020 for her PhD, supervised by Henrik Salje and Julian Parkhill. She studied the global dynamics of Bordetella pertussis, the bacterium behind whooping cough, using genomes from throughout Europe and the world in a collaborative project with Sylvain Brisse’s group at Institut Pasteur Paris. In 2023, she received the Johnstone and Florence Stoney PhD award, from the British Federation of Women Graduates. In 2024, Noémie was awarded an ETH fellowship and joined Tanja Stadler’s group at D-BSSE, ETH Zürich. Her research interests are focused on the development of mathematical models that help shed light on the underlying transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. She is particularly focusing on the use of genetic data, that is increasingly available and is bringing novel insights into pathogen transmission.