Jessica Kissinger is a Distinguished Research Professor at the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, University of Georgia and director of the Institute of Bioinformatics.
Her research focus is on the evolution, assembly and data curation of protozoan parasite genomes, particularly Cryptosporidium, Toxoplasma gondii and Plasmodium.
[1] During her PostDoc she worked with David Roos to help establish the Eukaryotic Pathogen Database (EuPathDB) series of genome collections, including the malaria specific PlasmoDB, for easy querying and access by scientists.
[8] In 2012 her lab helped develop a computational tool, MCScanX, to identify synteny across genomes, which has been cited >650 times.
The Malaria Host-Pathogen Interaction Center, a collaboration with Emory University, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and headed by Mary Galinski, is embarking on a major project to characterise many thousands of malaria-mammal associations and Kissinger is involved in converting this data into a format that can be used by everyone.