Rate My Professor Johanna Holm

Johanna B. Holm, PhD, serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, with affiliations at the Institute for Genome Sciences and the Center for Advanced Microbiome Research and Innovation. She earned a B.S. in Biology cum laude and with honors from Millersville University in 2006, followed by a Ph.D. in Marine Environmental Biology from the University of Southern California in 2015, where her thesis focused on the microbiome of gorgonian octocorals. Her early career included undergraduate research on cephalopod behavior and chemical communication, a technician role characterizing calcium channel interactions at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine from 2007 to 2010, and postdoctoral training from 2016 to 2020 at the Institute for Genome Sciences under Drs. Rebecca Brotman and Jacques Ravel. She advanced to Research Associate in 2021 before her current faculty appointment.

Dr. Holm's research centers on microbial ecology of the vaginal microbiome, employing multi-omics, bioinformatics, and experimental modeling to elucidate its influence on women's reproductive health, including susceptibility to pathogens like Chlamydia trachomatis, Mycoplasma genitalium, and Trichomonas vaginalis, as well as bacterial vaginosis recurrence. She has developed bioinformatic tools for high-resolution taxonomic and functional analysis and pioneered metagenomic community state types to predict infection risk. Notable publications include 'Integrating compositional and functional content to describe vaginal microbiomes in health and disease' (Microbiome, 2023), 'Lactobacillus iners and Genital Health: Molecular Clues to an Enigmatic Vaginal Species' (Current Infectious Disease Reports, 2023), 'Ultrahigh-Throughput Multiplexing and Sequencing of >500-Base-Pair Amplicon Regions on the Illumina HiSeq 2500 Platform' (mSystems, 2019), 'A comprehensive non-redundant gene catalog reveals extensive within-community intraspecies diversity in the human vagina' (Nature Communications, 2020), and 'Comparative Metagenome-Assembled Genome Analysis of “Candidatus Lachnocurva vaginae”' (Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, 2020). Her contributions are supported by NIH awards F32-AI136400 and K01-AI163413, the American Society for Microbiology Peggy Cotter Travel Award (2023), William E. Trusten Award (2015), and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Honorable Mention (2012). Her work bridges computational discovery with mechanistic validation to inform predictive diagnostics and antibiotic-sparing interventions.