Holst is a leader in the Mathematical and Computational Physics Research Group, the Center for Computational Mathematics, and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. His interdisciplinary work at the university reaches into the fields of biochemistry and biophysics, computational fluid dynamics, computer graphics, materials science, and numerical algorithms relativity. A century after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, he has been part of a $600 million National Science Foundation collaboration working on detecting them.