London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Professor Adam Kucharski, member of the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases steering committee and co-director of the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness & Response at LSHTM, has been named as one of the winners of this year’s Adams Prize for his world-leading research on diseases such as Ebola, dengue, influenza and COVID-19.

The Adams Prize is awarded each year by the University of Cambridge, to UK-based researchers under the age of 40 doing first class international research in the mathematical sciences.

He received the honour in recognition of key papers from throughout his career, which included new approaches to increase our understanding of infectious disease outbreaks, ranging from analysis of multiple disease strains and immunological dynamics to social behaviour and animal-to-human spillover.

Professor Kucharski, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, shares the 2023 award with Dr Anne Cori of Imperial College London. Former winners include theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking (1966), and the 2023 prize is awarded for achievements in the field of Mathematical and Statistical Epidemiology, a first since it was first awarded in 1850.

He said: “It's a real honour to be awarded this prize. It's great to see growing awareness of the value of mathematics and statistics in analysing epidemics, as reflected in this year's prize topic, and I've been fortunate to work with some excellent collaborators and mentors in this field, both at LSHTM and more broadly. I'm also delighted to be sharing with Dr Anne Cori, whose research I've really admired over the years.”

Dr Anne Cori, from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, said: “This joint prize is also testament of the excellence of both Imperial College London and LSHTM in infectious disease epidemiology. I don’t think either of us could have pursued research of the same quality without the stimulating research environment that both institutions offer.”

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College at Cambridge. It commemorates Adams’s role in the discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.

The prize includes approximately £30,000 in funding, part of which will be dedicated to supporting the winners’ research.