Professor Robert Holt

Rob studied at the University of British Columbia, and received his PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Alberta. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at the State University of New York, he joined Celera Genomics as the Scientific Operations Manager for initial sequencing of the human genome.

Since 2003, Rob has been a scientist at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at the British Columbia Cancer Agency (BCCA), where he is also Co-director of the BCCA Immunotherapy Program. He is recognized for his leadership role in decoding some of the first model organism and pathogen genomes and, more recently, for developing next-generation sequencing methods for interrogating the genetics of the adaptive immune system. He has served as a scientific advisor to the NIH Human Microbiome Project and discoveries by his research group have linked new infectious agents to cancer risk. His current basic and clinical research directions are focused on synthetic immunology and immune interventions in cancer, and also health care implementation research.