Dr Jessica Borger, Phd Email & Phone Number

Melbourne, Vic, Au

Australia

As Scientific Education Program Leader at the Walter Eliza Hall Institute, I lead the coordination and ongoing development of Honours, Masters and PhD programs. As leader of the Scientific Education team, I lead the identification, creation and implementation of novel scientific professional development resources and tools to provide our graduate students with beneficial knowledge and skills to apply within in their current research roles and to enhance their career progression in academia and beyond.

Australia

As Immunology Futures Editor at Immunology & Cell Biology (ICB), the flagship Immunology journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Immunology, I invite and edit timely articles from national and international experts in the field to comment in a new articles series for Immunology & Cell Biology. Immunology Futures is designed as a forum to promote dialog with the immunology research career, in particular early-career researchers. The series aims to be a platform for career advice, and to elevate the voices of diverse immunologists to provide multiple perspectives on a successful career in immunology.

Australia

As News and Commentary Editor at Immunology & Cell Biology (ICB), the flagship Immunology journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Immunology, I invite and edit News and Commentary articles from national and international experts in the field to comment on recently accepted or published novel, cutting-edge original research articles from journals including Nature, Mucosal Immunology and Immunology.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

As the Head of Department (delegate) and Graduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Medical Biology I am responsible for our PhD students’ candidature and academic requirements at WEHI.

Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria

As Graduate Course Coordinator at the Central Clinical School of Monash University, based at the Alfred Hospital, I was responsible for the coordination of graduate studies including the Translational PhD program and the Master of Clinical Research (Translational Medicine). These courses educate graduate students in translational neuroscience, immunology & haematology, metabolic disorders and bioinformatics and provide them the skills to apply this fundamental knowledge in clinical and translational research projects across the Alfred Research Alliance precinct.As a lecturer I coordinated Clinical and Translational Haematology and Immunology (TRM6004), Translational Research: pathways to the clinic (TRM6002) and coordinated the Immunology content within first year Medicine. I also lectured into second year Immunology and third year Clinical Immunopathology.

Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia

CASS Foundation (2019-2020) funding to design superior CAR-T therapy approaches using novel intracellular checkpoint blockade targets. Other areas of research focus on investigating the signaling pathways of gamma delta T cells and their contribution to inflammation in models of lung disease, as well as interrogating signaling pathways involved in B cell development, activation and function.

Guest editor of the special research topic ‘The Role of Innate Lymphoid Cells in Mucosal Immunity’. I edited 17 manuscripts, with co-editors Dr Joanna Kirman and Prof. Graham Le Gros, on the role of ILC in mucosal immunity. Topics included the role of ILC in the fetal/maternal compartment, cancer, helminth infection and lung disease.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Research involved invetigating the role of the polarity proteins Par3 and Scribble in steady state haematopoesis and models of T-ALL and CML

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Investigating how the spatio-temporal localisation of key T cell signaling molecules and receptors impact upon the functional response of T cells, in particular how the memory response becomes finally tune in this process creating a more rapid and robust response compared to that of naive T cells. In addition, research also involved determining how changes in membrane dynamics and localisation of critical T cell signaling molecules and receptors can impact integrin signaling and T cell adherence and migration.Additional and ongoing research involves investigating the biogenesis, composition and function of T cell derived extracellular vesicles.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Research is focussed on understanding how miRNA control immune signalling and how pathogens manipulate these processes. DC involvement in an in vivo model of murine infection of the parasitic helminth Schistosoma mansoni focussed on trying to understand the role of DC in initiating and directing the adaptive immune response to S. mansoni in eliciting Th2 responses. This was addressed primarily by confocal microscopy to identify granuloma formation, structure and cell interactions, with additional studies comparing wild-type to gene-deficient mice to define the source and importance of key molecules during this process. Furthermore, using fluorescent in situ hybridisation, I aim to identify the distribution of specific miRNA involved in S. mansoni infection and associated secretory pathways of miRNA in the liver.

London, United Kingdom

Awarded a Medical Research Centre (MRC) PhD fellowship at the National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), now the Francis Crick Institute. Research was focussed on interrogating early T cell signaling events, in regard to the localisation of key signaling molecules and how distribution of these critical protein tyrosine kinases may differentially localise between naive and memory CD8+ T cells, conveying in part, why memory T cells have a more robust response to infection. The difference in response between naive and memory T cells we also found to be dependent on the association of TCR with the coreceptor CD8, with memory CD8+ T cells having more preformed TCR:CD8 clusters than naive cells.

London, England, United Kingdom

Research for the pharmaceutical industry in the area of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) drug discovery, involving molecular studies of the mode of action of potential drug candidates for HCV 1b.

London, England, United Kingdom

Research for pharmaceutical industry in the area of anti-infectives and clinical trial support, involving the investigation of new mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance through PCR based assays to detect antimicrobial resistance genes in bacteria and epidemiological research using multi-locus sequence typing.

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Establishment of multiplexes for fragment analysis of specific informative STR loci for Parentage testing and the compilation of allele frequencies for creation of a population database representative of the genera Australian population for use in determining the relative chance of paternity.

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Detection of known mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes for clinical diagnosis of familial breast cancer in referred patient samples; Parentage Testing; Operation of Automated Sequencers for the IMVS sequencing centre and production of oligonucleotides.

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Certificate, Graduate Teaching

Graduate Diploma Public Policy

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Immunology

Bachelor Of Medical And Pharmaceutical Biotechnology (Hons)