Dr. Jessica Kissinger will share her nonlinear academic career path.

Dr. Kissinger has a long-standing interest in apicomplexan genomics, horizontal and intracellular gene transfer and evolution. Her post-doctoral research at the NIH focused on the origin and phylogeny of human-infecting Plasmodium species and later collaborative work focused on creating the first integrated genome resource for Plasmodium, PlasmoDB (Kissinger et al., Nature, 2002). Collaboratively with two research groups at UPENN, she created, maintain and grown the NIH-contract Bioinformatics Resource Center database, EuPathDB (Aurrecoechea et al., NAR, 2009). The goal of the proposed research is to provide an integrated approach to the study of host-pathogen interactions in non-human primate malaria model systems. This project will generate several types of data on an unprecedented scale that will need to be stored, analyzed with computational approaches and shared with the larger scientific community. Her role on this project will involve the exciting challenge of creating computational tools and resources for host-pathogen interactions. Her duties will also consist of data management for the significant quantity of data that will be generated and integration with other available information. Her research group has experience with relational databases, workflows, ontology creation and application, metadata capture, comparative genomics, protist genome architecture and apicomplexan gene regulation.