I am an infectious disease modeller and genomic epidemiologist based in London, UK. I am a Research Fellow in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London funded by a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award. Previously, I completed a PhD in the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases unit at Institut Pasteur (Paris) and a postdoc in the Bedford Lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (Seattle).
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 how transmission flows between groups such as ages, geographies 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 proximal 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 be recruiting to work on these questions from autumn 2026. If you’re interested, please get in touch!
Selected publications
View all publicationsSARS-CoV-2 saltational events are recurrent and trace to persistent human infections
Tran-Kiem et al. 2026. bioRxiv.
Fine-scale patterns of SARS-CoV-2 spread from identical pathogen sequences
Tran-Kiem et al. 2025. Nature.
Estimating the reproduction number and transmission heterogeneity from the size distribution of clusters of identical pathogen sequences
Tran-Kiem and Bedford. 2024. PNAS.
SARS-CoV-2 transmission across age groups in France and implications for control
Tran Kiem al. 2021. Nature Communications.
A modelling study investigating short and medium-term challenges for COVID-19 vaccination: From prioritisation to the relaxation of measures
Tran Kiem et al. 2021. eClinicalMedicine.
Estimating the burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France
Salje*, Tran Kiem* et al. 2020. Science.