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Professor of Virology, University of Sydney, Australia
Leadership Fellow, National Health and Medical Research Council

Edward (Eddie) Holmes is a National Health and Medical Research Council Leadership Fellow and Professor of Virology at the University of Sydney, Australia. Eddie received his undergraduate degree from the University of London (1986) and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (1990). Following that, he performed postdoctoral research at the Universities of California (Davis), Edinburgh and Oxford.

Between 1993-2004, he held various positions at the University of Oxford, including University Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Fellow of New College. Between 2005 and 2012, he was a Professor at the Pennsylvania State University, USA, before moving to Sydney.

His research focuses on understanding the nature of global virus diversity – the virosphere – and the major mechanisms of virus evolution, with a special emphasis on revealing the ecology, evolution, and emergence of RNA viruses. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2015 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK) in 2017. In 2021 he received the (Australian) Prime Minister’s Prize for Science and was recently awarded the 2024 Croonian Medal and Lecture by The Royal Society.

Publications