Lab Head – Prof Kat Holt (PhD)
ORCID • Google Scholar • PubMed • Twitter • GitHub • Monash • LSHTM
Postdoctoral researchers
Dr Kelly Wyres (DPhil)
Kelly joined the lab in 2015 and is now a NHMRC Investigator. Her work focusses on understanding the evolution and epidemiology of Klebsiella pneumoniae, in particular how and why this species is subdivided into hundreds of distinct clones that cause different clinical problems. Click here to read more or find Kelly on Google Scholar.
Dr Margaret Lam (PhD)
Margaret (Maggie) joined the group in July 2015 as an RA before starting as a postdoctoral fellow the following year. Here, her research has largely focussed on using comparative genomics and computation biology to unravel the incredible genetic diversity and mobilisation mechanisms of key virulence loci in Klebsiella pneumoniae. Prior to this, Maggie completed a Bachelor in Biomedical Science, Honours in Science and a Doctoral degree at The University of Melbourne. Find Maggie on Google Scholar.
Dr Jane Hawkey (PhD)
Jane joined the lab in 2013 as a PhD student, with a focus on the mobile elements that are responsible for disseminating antimicrobial resistance. During her PhD she developed the software ISMapper for enabling the detection of insertion sequences from short-read sequencing data. After the completion of her PhD in 2017, Jane became a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the group. She is interested in the genomic evolution of hospital pathogens, particularly regarding mobile genetic elements that are shared between species. Find Jane on Google Scholar.
Dr Zoe Dyson (PhD)
Zoe’s research focusses on the bacterial cause of Typhoid fever. She uses genomic sequence analyses to understand how these bacteria spread within and between geographies and how they evolve drug-resistance. Zoe is currently seconded to the University of Cambridge (UK) working on the Strategic Alliance for Typhoid in Asia and Africa (STRATAA) project. Find Zoe on Google Scholar.
Lab Manager
Dr Louise Judd (PhD)
Louise manages the group’s wet lab space and equipment, and performs the majority of our wet lab experiments. These include DNA or RNA extractions and sequencing, and bacterial phenotyping e.g. antibiotic susceptibility testing. Louise developed the lab’s protocol for multiplexed long read sequencing on the Oxford Nanopore platform, which has become an integral component of many of our projects. Find Louise on Google Scholar.
Research assistant
Taylor Harshegyi
Taylor holds a MSc in Biomedical Science and joined the lab in 2019 to assist with wet lab experiments and sequencing projects.
Graduate students
Stephen Watts
Stephen is a PhD student investigating respiratory pathogens. He uses a combination of 16S RNA sequence and whole genome sequence data to explore the ecology and evolution of bacteria that colonise or cause disease in the respiratory tract. As part of this work Stephen developed FastSpar and HiCap.
Ryan Wick
Ryan Wick is a PhD student and research assistant. He developed Bandage & Unicycler. His work mainly focuses on bacterial genome assembly with an emphasis on the use of data from Oxford Nanopore’s sequencing platforms. His broader academic interests include machine learning, metagenomics and phylogenomics. Find Ryan on Google Scholar.
David Edwards
David originally joined the lab as a Masters project student, wherein he developed RedDog for bacterial nucleotide variant and gene content analysis. David is now a PhD student investigating approaches for detecting different types of natural selection in pathogen populations. Find David on Google Scholar.
Masters & Honours students
Kalani Paranagama
Kalani is an Honours student, working on developing a rapid genotyping scheme for Shigella sonnei. She is interested in learning how computational biology can be applied in a diagnostic setting.
Roni Froumine
Roni is working towards an MSc in Bioinformatics. She is using bioinformatics approaches to investigate CRISPR/Cas locus diversity and activity in Klebsiella pneumoniae.
Honoraries, Visitors & Grad students based in other labs
- Dr Guillaume Meric (Postdoc) – Pathogen and microbiome genomics (Inouye lab, Baker Institute)
- Dr Shu Mei Teo (Postdoc) – Human microbiome and asthma development (Inouye lab, Baker Institute)
- Dr Cadhla Firth (Postdoc Fellow) – James Cook University, Cairns
- Owen Qin (PhD student) – Host/microbe genetics (Inouye lab, Baker Institute)
- Qin Qin Huang (PhD student ) – Expression QTLs in immune development (Inouye lab, Baker Institute)
- Howard Tang (PhD student ) – Systems genomics of asthma (Inouye lab, Baker Institute)
- Jake Barber (PhD student) – Experimental evolution (McDonald lab, Monash University)
- Heyu Lin (PhD student) – Mercury methylation (Moreau lab, University of Melbourne Earth Sciences)
- Zetao Sun (MSc student) – Resistance mechanisms in Klebsiella (Velkov lab, University of Melbourne Pharmacology)
Alumni
- Claire Gorrie (PhD) – K. pneumoniae genomic epidemiology
- Danielle Ingle (PhD) – E. coli genomics
- Dr Mark Schultz (Postdoc) – A. baumannii phylogenomics and metagenomics
- Sebastian Duchene (Postdoc) – Phylodynamics
- Dr Paul McAdam (Postdoc) – TB phylogenomics
- Macgregor Todd (MSc Bioinformatics)
- Marialena Michanetzi (MSc Bioinformatics)
- Cassandra Litchfield (MSc Bioinformatics)
- Damien Zammit (MSc Bioinformatics) – Recombination analysis
- Alex Tokolyi (Honours) – Plasmid genomics
- Harriet Dashnow (VLSCI intern) – SRST2 early development
- Partha Sarathi Gope (MPhil) – Plasmid bioinformatics
- Louise Cerdeira (Visiting PhD student from University of São Paulo) – KPC plasmids
- Carl Britto (Visiting PhD student from Oxford University) – Enteric fever
- Gittan Blezer (MSc internship project from University of Utrecht) – K. pneumoniae core genome
- Morgan Cerqueira Alves (3rd-year Biochemistry research project) – ESBL in K. pneumoniae
- Wassif Kabir (3rd-year Biochemistry research project) – Salmonella Kentucky phylogenomics
- Muhammad Fadli Bin Ismail (3rd-year Biochemistry research project) – K. oxytoca comparative genomics
- Yu Wan (PhD) – detection of AMR gene transfer
- Leo Featherstone (Honours) – cluster detection from phylogenies
