Associate Professor Kelly Wyres

AMR IMPACT THEME

  • AMR Evolution and Protective Microbiomes

EXPERTISE

  • Bacterial population biology
  • Genomic epidemiology and evolution
  • Genome-scale metabolic modelling

Associate Professor Kelly Wyres is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow based in the Department of Infectious Diseases, where she leads an independent research group within the Infectious Diseases Genomics research program. Kelly completed her Bachelor’s and Doctoral degrees at the University of Oxford, UK, where she held a prestigious St Catherine's College Graduate Scholarship. During her DPhil (doctoral degree), she studied the genomic evolution of the bacterial pathogen, Streptococcus pneumoniae, focussing on the evolution of penicillin resistance and capsule switching, the latter of which has implications for the design of S. pneumoniae vaccines. Following her DPhil, Kelly moved to Australia and spent 2 ½ years as a Staff Researcher at IBM Research – Australia. She was a founding member of the IBM Research – Australia Genomics Team and later became the Team Lead. In this role, she was primarily interested in exploring the use of computing for clinical and public health genomics. After deciding to return to an academic research role, Kelly became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Microbial Genomics lab led by Prof Kathryn Holt. It was in this role that Kelly developed an enthusiasm for the biology of Klebsiella, the group of bacteria that remains her primary research focus.

Kelly is a computational microbiologist who uses comparative genomics and metabolic modelling to investigate the diversity and evolution of bacterial pathogens. Her work has a particular focus on Klebsiella sp., including Klebsiella pneumoniae, a World Health Organization priority AMR pathogen. K. pneumoniae are extremely diverse and individually exhibit extensive variation in clinically-relevant traits such as drug resistance, pathogenicity and virulence factors. Kelly’s research has two major themes; 1) to understand how and why genomic and metabolic diversity is structured in the K. pneumoniae population, and how this relates to strain-specific clinical risk e.g. the risk of causing different types of infection, evolving multi-drug resistance, or transmitting in the hospital setting; 2) to develop and apply genomic tools for the prediction of the major surface antigens that form the targets for novel anti-Klebsiella vaccines.

AMR FOCUS 

  • Understanding the epidemiology and evolution of bacteria pathogens
  • Identification of bacterial genomic and metabolic traits associated with enhanced clinical risk
  • Development and application of genomic tools to identify bacterial surface antigens, which are targets for novel anti-bacterial vaccines and phage therapies

IMPACT

  • Genomic tools to support public health surveillance of bacterial pathogens
  • Prioritisation of antigens for inclusion in novel vaccines targeting AMR bacteria
  • Identification of novel drug targets among AMR bacteria

HIGHLIGHTS