Rate My Professor Andrew Holmes

Associate Professor Andrew Holmes is a microbial ecologist affiliated with the School of Life and Environmental Sciences in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. He is based at the Charles Perkins Centre, where he leads the Gut Microbiome Project Node. His research specializations encompass microbial ecology, bacteriology, infectious agents, microbial genetics, nutritional science, and clinical sciences. Holmes investigates the gut microbiome's dynamics in the context of human health, nutrition, metabolic diseases, and animal production. Notable areas include diet-microbiome interactions, macronutrient influences on microbial communities, and the microbiome's role in weight loss, immunotherapy outcomes, and metabolic responses. He has contributed to understanding how intestinal nitrogen availability controls diet-microbiome interactions and how macronutrients mediate functional relationships between hosts and microbes such as Wolbachia in Drosophila.

Andrew Holmes has produced over 200 research outputs, accumulating more than 9,000 citations as per his ResearchGate profile. Key publications include 'Diet-Microbiome Interactions in Health Are Controlled by Intestinal Nitrogen Availability' (Cell Metabolism, 2017), 'Macronutrients mediate the functional relationship between Drosophila and Wolbachia' (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2015), 'Genome-scale metabolic modelling of human gut microbes to inform rational community design' (2025), 'Gut Microbiome Diversity and Uric Acid in Serum and Urine' (2025), and 'Third generation cephalosporins and piperacillin/tazobactam have distinct impacts on the intestinal microbiome in critically ill patients' (Scientific Reports, 2021). His work has secured funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), including grants for identifying microbiome control of weight loss during dietary intervention (2012) and microbe-immune interactions shaping immune checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy outcomes (2024). Previously, he conducted research on soil microbiology at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, University of Western Sydney. Holmes serves as a Fellow of Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) and has presented seminars such as 'Intestinal microbiome in human health and animal production' (2025). His contributions advance knowledge of microbiome impacts on health and nutrition.