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 Deputy Director of the Centre to Impact AMR. Kelly leads a research group and co-leads the Infectious Diseases Genomics research program at the Department of Infectious Diseases. She is a Monash University Research Talent Accelerator Fellow 2024, former NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and recipient of multiple research funding awards, including from the Australian Research Council and the Gates Foundation. In 2024 and 2025 Kelly was named as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, and in 2025 awarded the Australian Society of Microbiology’s prestigious Frank Fenner Award.

Kelly’s team uses comparative genomics techniques and metabolic modelling to investigate the diversity of bacterial pathogens, with a major focus on the global priority pathogen, Klebsiella pneumoniae. They are particularly interested in diversity of surface antigens as targets for novel vaccines and phage therapies, and are the developers of Kaptive and Kaptive Web (tools for identification of surface antigen loci in whole genome sequence data). These tools are used by research and public health labs globally, and power sero-epidemiology studies that are directly informing the design of novel anti-Klebsiella vaccines via an ongoing engagement with the Gates Foundation.

Kelly holds a BA (Hons) in Biological Sciences and DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a St Peter’s College Domus Scholarship and the prestigious St Catherine’s College Graduate Scholarship (Sciences). Her doctoral thesis explored the genomic evolution of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a bacterial pathogen that causes pneumonia and meningitis in young children and the elderly. After completing her DPhil, Kelly moved to Australia and spent 2.5 years in an industry research role at IBM Research – Australia, first as a Staff Researcher and later as the Genomics Team Lead. Here her primary work focussed on the use of computing to facilitate the adoption of high-throughput DNA sequencing in clinical and public health microbiology labs. In September 2015 Kelly transitioned back to an academic research role as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Microbial Genomics lab led by Kathryn Holt. In 2020, Kelly began building her own research team, which later span out into an independent research group.

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

LEADERSHIP

  • Deputy Director: Centre to Impact AMR

HIGHLIGHTS