Ian Holmes

Ian Holmes is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He leads the Holmes Lab, which integrates machine learning, statistical linguistics, and phylogenetics to analyze genomic data. His work focuses on RNA structure modeling, genome annotation, metagenomics, and developing open-source tools like JBrowse for genomic visualization.

Research areas include computational methods for analyzing insertion-deletion events in genomes, metagenomic species distribution analysis, and collaborative web applications for genomic data interpretation. Key contributions include JBrowse 2 (a modular genome browser), CNVpytor (for copy number variation analysis), and CellScape (protein structure visualization).

His research emphasizes practical tools for genomic analysis, with a focus on improving accuracy in bioinformatics workflows and enabling interdisciplinary collaboration. The Holmes Lab also explores evolutionary dynamics of genomic elements and applies statistical approaches to address challenges in molecular biology and bioinformatics.