Holt is an Australian computational biologist specialising in infectious disease genomics at the University of Melbourne and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and is currently a HHMI-Gates International Research Scholar and Viertel Foundation Senior Medical Research Fellow. Kat and her group use genome sequencing, phylogenetics, spatiotemporal analysis and epidemiology to study the evolution and transmission of bacterial pathogens, including tropical diseases such as typhoid and dysentery, tuberculosis, and hospital associated pathogens. She is particularly focused on the global health crisis of antimicrobial resistance, using genomic epidemiology tools to understand the evolutionary history and global dissemination of multidrug resistant pathogens, and developing new tools for prospective surveillance and tracking of emerging problems in the public health and clinical infectious disease space. Recognising that the rise of antimicrobial resistance is due in large part to horizontal transfer of genes between bacterial species, Holt is also interested in the interplay between infectious disease-causing bacteria and microbial communities in human, animal and environmental microbiomes. Kat has been awarded the Australian Academy of Science’s Gottschalk Medal for early career medical research (2017), a Georgina Sweet Award for Women in Quantitative Biomedical Science (2016), L’Oréal-UNESCO Rising Talents Fellowship (2015), and is a Senior Editor of the new journal Microbial Genomics.
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