Logo designed by Amanda Williams
We integrate multi-omics datasets with epidemiological modeling and in vitro investigations for the improvement of women’s genital health outcomes
A video about our recent work published in Microbiome
Holm, J.B., France, M.T., Gajer, P. et al. Integrating compositional and functional content to describe vaginal microbiomes in health and disease. Microbiome 11, 259 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-023-01692-x
Health Sciences Facility III
ABOUT THE LAB Johanna Holm is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She is affiliated with the Institute for Genome Sciences, where her laboratory resides. Her lab is interested in driving multi-omic and molecular investigations of the vaginal microbiome and microenvironment for the improvement of women’s genital health.
We are passionate about training the next generation of scientists and have opportunities for people interested in either bioinformatics, lab-based research, or both!
About Professor Holm:
I began my research career in 2002 as a freshman at Millersville University of Pennsylvania in the cephalopod laboratory of Dr. Jean Boal. Over the next four years, I contributed to multiple research projects in that group focused on mating, foraging, learning, and communication in cephalopods, and I learned about ecology, chemical communication, and statistics including statistical power and sample sizes. This work resulted in publications showing that cephalopods are capable of conditional discrimination learning, and that chemical communication plays an essential role in successful mating.
In 2007, I began my appointment as a Technician III and unofficial laboratory manager for Dr. William Horne in the Department of Clinical Sciences at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Dr. Horne was an established researcher in pain therapy and was the resident anesthesiologist at the veterinary hospital. The laboratory’s focus was the characterization of interactions and functions of calcium channel subunits, and the role that drugs such as gabapentin played in altering these functions. This opportunity made me proficient in molecular biology bench skills including PCR optimization, RNA reverse transcription, protein expression and binding assays (pull-down experiments), FPLC, and electrophysiology using the Xenopus oocyte model system.
In 2015, I was awarded a Ph.D. in Marine and Environment Biology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. Under the direction of my mentor Dr. Karla Heidelberg, I became proficient in microbial profiling using 16S- and 18S- rRNA gene sequences for prokaryotic and eukaryotic populations. This began with a project examining seasonal protist populations in a hypersaline lake. I then designed and executed an independent research project which explored the microbiota associated with an ecologically important and abundant species of soft coral in southern California coastal environments that had not been closely examined since the 1970s. I provided the first foundational information about the microbes associated with these species, including the description of photosynthetic, algal entities, unrelated to Dinoflagellates, in the polyps of these corals.
My postdoctoral training was in the laboratories of Dr. Rebecca Brotman, Ph.D., MPH, and Dr. Jacques Ravel, Ph.D. at the Institute for Genome Sciences and the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. I am now an Assistant Professor at IGS and am actively building my lab.