Kat is a computational biologist specialising in infectious disease genomics.

She is Professor of Microbial Systems Genomics at LSHTM’s Department of Infection Biology, Co-Director of the LSHTM Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Centre, and Editor-in-Chief of the UK Microbiology Society journal Microbial Genomics. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at Monash University in Australia.

Kat has a BA/BSc (Hons) majoring in Biochemistry, Applied Statistics and Philosophy (University of Western Australia); a Master of Epidemiology (University of Melbourne); and a PhD in Molecular Biology (University of Cambridge and Sanger Institute).

Kat’s research group uses computational genomics and sequencing, phylogenetics, spatiotemporal analysis and epidemiology to study the evolution and transmission of bacterial pathogens, including tropical diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, E. coli diarrhea and tuberculosis; and hospital associated pathogens such as Klebsiella and Acinetobacter.

Kat is particularly interested in the global health crisis of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), 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. Kat is also interested in human, animal and environmental microbiomes, and their role in chronic disease, infectious disease, and horizontal gene transfer. Her lab
develops bioinformatics software when needed, and have developed numerous bioinformatics tools for pathogen genotyping and nanopore sequencing.

Key organisms of focus for tool development and applied global analyses are Klebsiella pneumoniae (see klebnet.org) and typhoid fever
(see typhoidgenomics.org and typhi.net).

Publications can be found via Google Scholar & ORCID.

In this talk, Kat provides a genomics-based insight into AMR in Klebsiella pneumoniae, a WHO critical-priority pathogen and leading cause of drug- resistant infections globally.