Dr Kathryn Holt
Kathryn is an NHMRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Strugnell Laboratory at the University of Melbourne's Department of Microbiology and Immunology. She uses next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics approaches to analyse the genomes of bacterial pathogens, covering a number of areas including microevolution, population structure and genomic epidemiology. One aspect of her research is to identify genetic determinants of pathogenesis by comparing the genomes of bacterial pathogens (which cause disease in humans) with their close non-pathogenic relatives (which can colonise humans without causing disease). Another is to study how bacterial pathogens evolve resistance to the antimicrobial drugs we use to treat infections. Kathryn's research focuses mainly on the Gram-negative enteric pathogens Salmonella, Shigella, E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, but she has an interest in a wide range of pathogenic bacteria and also uses 16S rRNA sequencing to profile the populations of bacteria colonizing humans in health and disease.
Kathryn completed her PhD in 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Gordon Dougan and Prof. Julian Parkhill at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge (UK). In 2010 she was awarded a Postdoctoral Training Fellowship from the NHMRC to work on genomic epidemiology of bacterial pathogens with Prof. Richard Strugnell at the University of Melbourne.
