Michael Hall

My research helps clinicians and laboratories detect drug-resistant infections and track how they spread, so hospitals can respond faster and patients receive effective treatment sooner. As antimicrobial resistance rises worldwide, the speed and accuracy of genome-based testing is increasingly central to patient safety and public health.

A recent example is my genomic analysis of a hospital outbreak of drug-resistant Enterococcus, which supported the investigation and the infection control decisions that followed. My methods also make it possible to sequence pathogens directly from patient samples, avoiding the days or weeks usually lost to laboratory culture.

Much of my impact comes from free, open-source software used every day by the global genomics community. My tools have been downloaded by laboratories and researchers worldwide — one of them more than 70,000 times — and are built into widely used analysis pipelines, lowering the cost and technical barriers to genome sequencing.

I have also contributed to international tuberculosis genomics, including the World Health Organization's catalogue of drug-resistance mutations used by laboratories worldwide.

Real-world outcomes of my work include:

- Faster detection and tracking of drug-resistant infections - Support for hospital outbreak response and infection control - Open-source tools adopted by laboratories around the world - Lower cost and complexity of genome sequencing