Janet Hemingway started her career in genetics with a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After a spell as a lecturer in toxicology at the University of California Riverside she returned to the UK on a Medical Research Council fellowship and was then awarded one of the first of the Royal Society 10-year Junior Research Fellowships in 1985. Janet was head-hunted by the University of Cardiff in 1993 to oversee the research programmes of their preclinical and biological sciences, helping transform their activity. She was then head- hunted to become Director of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in 2001 and helpED to rapidly expand the School over the next 20 years, allowing it to gain independent Higher Education Institution status. In 2005 she split her role, 50% as Director of LSTM and 50% as the Founding Director of The Innovative Vector Control Consortium, a vector biology Product Development Partnership funded by an initial $50M award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2020 she stepped down as Director of LSTM and established the iiCON Consortium an R&D partnership to help bring new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics for infectious disease to market more effectively. Alongside multiple academic accolades, including Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011, Life fellow of the Royal College of Physicians 2008 and International Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences USA (2010), she has numerous business and national awards including receiving a CBE in 2012 and recognised as Northern Business Leader of the Year in 2023.

Janet has more than 200 academic publications spanning a broad range of topics. These range from an early career interest in the genetics and biochemistry of insecticide resistance in mosquitoes, where she became an acknowledged world leader, to operating a broad portfolio of research activity spanning novel diagnostic development, early stage insecticide and drug development, large scale operationally embedded randomised control trials for establishing product efficacy, and supporting major disease elimination programmes, most notably malaria elimination in Sri Lanka over a 20 year period and Visceral Leishmaniasis elimination in India over a 10 year period. She has acted as an advisor to multiple Ministries of Health across Africa, Asia and Latin America on insect vector control and was appointed as a senior advisor on neglected tropical diseases by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Along the way she has been the founder and, in several cases, the initial CEO of eight small spin out companies, the most recent being iiDiagnostics established in 2023.