By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
Jessica Kissinger is always in a hurry. An
airplane may be waiting to take this expert in parasite genomics
to a conference in Europe or Asia. A student may be standing in
the hall waiting to discuss a grade. And she needs to get back to
her research, which is helping re-imagine how scientists use computers
to study disease.
An intense woman who has trouble sitting still, Kissinger only begins
to relax when she starts to explain her work on the genomes of parasites
and how learning more about them can lead to new drugs that can
limit sickness and death among the earth’s suffering millions.
As an undergraduate, Kissinger went to the University of Chicago,
where she studied evolutionary biology. But she was also deeply
interested in a somewhat more arcane field: the history and philosophy
of science. That cross-cultural kind of thinking has colored her
work since then.
“I was troubled, as I studied resistant bacteria, that the
main method of preventing the diseases they cause was to ‘kill
the bugs,’ as opposed to understanding them,” says Kissinger.
At the end of her third year, she realized that what she really
wanted to study was molecular phylogeny—how traits evolve
in organisms at the molecular level. If science could understand
disease-causing organisms better, she reasoned, there would almost
certainly be a better way to control them and the diseases they
cause.
When Kissinger began work on her doctorate at Indiana University,
she studied development in sea urchins, using that fascinating creature
as the basis for her research on the processes of evolution.
But she was still interested in disease processes. She spent a year
on a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Institutes of Health
in Bethesda, Md., where she began to investigate Plasmodium,
the parasite that causes malaria, a disease that still sickens
or kills millions of people each year, mostly children. Then she
and her husband went to his native Brazil, where she spent 1996–98
as a postdoctoral fellow in the city of Belo Horizonte. A final
postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania turned
into a lectureship.
Kissinger chose to take her first full-time faculty position at
UGA as one of three new hires in the recently formed Center for
Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, with an academic home in
the department of genetics. She is passionate about teaching. In
addition to teaching her students at UGA, she has been a frequent
teacher to groups all over the world through the World Health Organization.
Kissinger’s work and range of interests can be divided into
two areas: the data world and the bio world.
In the data world, she is working with UGA’s department of
computer science to develop databases for parasitic genomes. The
databases are completely reorienting approaches to research, both
in genomes and in the computer applications needed to utilize the
information.
Kissinger’s fascination with her data world is growing by
the day, but her work in the bio world is just as intense. It involves
the relatively new field of comparative genomics. She and her research
team focus on (but are not limited to) studies of the phylum Apicomplexa,
which includes an estimated 5,000 species, all of which are believed
to be parasitic.
The Apicomplexa have a rich evolutionary history that makes understanding
them in the laboratory setting a crucial adjunct to the database
work. Kissinger’s lab now has a number of projects under way,
on such species as Toxoplasma and the AIDS pathogen Cryptosporidium.
“The need is urgent,” she says, “since science
at present has no efficient cure for any of the diseases caused
by Apicomplexan parasites such as malaria or cryptosporidosis.”
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