Lab Members | Kissinger Research Group

CURRENT LAB MEMBERS

Fiifi Agyabeng-Dadzie

Graduate Research Assistant

Fiifi is a Genetics PhD student in the Kissinger Lab.

Rachel Ankirskiy

Rachel Ankirskiy's Portrait

Administrative Specialist II

VEuPathDB Project & Kissinger Lab Administrative Specialist

Rachel provides administrative support for the VEuPathDB Project and the Kissinger Research Group. She helps out with various tasks, from assisting with travel arrangements to scheduling to planning the annual VEuPathDB workshop.

Cristina Aurrecoechea

Cristina Aurrecoechea's Portrait

VEuPathDB UI Team Manager

VEuPathDB Project | UI Team

Cristina co-manages the UI-Infra team with Steve Fischer (University of Pennsylvania). Her role is making sure we are on track, participating on design discussions, doing quality control, implementing specific requests and helping with cross-team coordination. We have fun working together and are never short on challenges!

Dave Falke

Dave Falke's Portrait

Senior User Interface Developer

VEupathDB Project | UI Team

Dave is the lead User Interface developer for the VEuPathDB and ClinEpiDB projects, including websites like plasmodb.org and clinepidb.org. He provides web development of database resources for bioinformatics and genome data, including client architecture and UI development.

Jay Humphrey

Jay Humphrey's Portrait

Data Loader

VEuPathDB & ClinEpiDB Projects | Data Loading Team

Jay is a Data Loader on the Data Loading team of the VEuPathDB & ClinEpiDB project.

Jessica "Jessie" Kissinger, PhD

Principal Investigator & Lab Head

Distinguished Professor, Department of Genetics

Member, Center for Tropical & Emerging Global Diseases

Member, Institute of Bioinformatics

Dr. Jessica "Jessie" Kissinger is a distinguished professor of Genetics and former director of the Institute of Bioinformatics (2010-2019). Her research focuses on the evolution of parasite genomes, in particular, the genomes of organisms that cause malaria, toxoplasmosis and cryptosporidiosis. Her research area has necessitated the development of new computational tools to address issues gene transfer and syntenic regions of genome sequences as well tools related to data integration, data sharing and data mining in addition to traditional “wet laboratory” experimentation. One of the resources that she helped to develop, and for which she is now a Co-I, is a resource called VEuPathDB. This database, which has evolved into a large international project, serves the eukaryotic pathogen research community. Her research has led her to be involved in numerous international collaborations. She lived in Brazil for two years while studying malaria and she returned for 20 years as joint-PI of a Fogarty Bioinformatics training grants and as a researcher in the Ciências sem Fronteiras program. Internationally, she is a member of numerous advisory boards and committees, and advises on issues related to bioinformatics training and research. She currently has projects funded by the NIH, DARPA, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, and collaborates closely with teams at Emory, Georgia Tech, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Liverpool.

Nupur Kittur

Community Outreach & Scientific Data Specialist

ClinEpiDB Project

Nupur supports the ClinEpiDB project by triaging, processing, and curating data and additional software tools for the online epidemiological database resource, ClinEpDB.org.

Kris Lamoureux

Systems Administrator

VEuPathDB Project | Systems Team

Kris is a systems administrator who helps manage the software, hardware, and networks behind VEuPathDB's services. He helps ensure security best practices are being followed and that services stay available. Kris extends technical support to the Kissinger Research Group and others within the project.

Mohammad Obaidat

Visiting Scholar/Student

Mohammad is a professor at the Jordan University of Science and Technology, and is a visiting student and scholar in the lab.

Mustafa Nural

Mustafa Nural's Portrait

Data Manager

DARPA ThIRM Project, NIH CIDER Project & VEuPathDB Project

Mustafa provides data management and infrastructure support for the DARPA's ThIRM project and the NIH CIDER project. His daily routine involves a wide range activities from programming, database development, and attending to sysadmin duties to working with wet lab scientists to develop and implement sample & data management solutions.

Lasya Penumarthi

Graduate Research Assistant

Lasya is a Bioinformatics PhD student in the Kissinger Lab.

Drew Spruill

Drew Spruill's Favorite Animal

Senior Systems Administrator

VEuPathDB Project | Systems Team

Drew is part of the Systems team of the VEuPathDB project. He provides systems administration support to the VEuPathDB Team.

Haiming Wang

Senior Data Loader

VEuPathDB Project | Data Loading Team

Haiming is part of the Data Loading Team of the VEuPathDB Project. He provides biological data processing and analysis, data visualization and statistical implementation for the VEuPathDB Project.

Susanne Warrenfeltz

Susanne Warrenfeltz's Portrait

Community Outreach Specialist

VEuPathDB Project | Outreach Team

Susanne is an Outreach Specialist for VEuPathDB. She interacts with scientists who use the databases, helping them take full advantage of the data, tools and features. Susanne helps run the VEuPathDB User Experience Group which transforms suggestions from users into workable solutions so that our tools and features are easily accessible, intuitive, and reflect current scientific knowledge and the needs of the research community.

Rui "Ray" Xiao

Graduate Student Researcher

Parasite Evolutionary Genomics Group

Ray is a Bioinformatics PhD student in the Kissinger Lab. His first project will be to disambiguate Cryptosporidium transcripts with new PacBio IsoSeq full-read data.