Iris Holmes, Postdoctoral Researcher

“What conditions select on microbes to increase their pandemic potential?”

Iris Holmes is interested in using microbial community ecology to understand the process of disease emergence. She focuses on identifing the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms driving host generalism in microbes, as generalists can more easily switch host species and emerge as novel pathogens.  She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease, and works part-time witht the Plowright lab. In August 2023, she will be working full-time as a postdoc associated with the Lancet Commission on Prevention of Viral Spillover. She received her Ph.D. in 2020 from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, and her undergraduate degree in Biology from Cornell University in 2010.