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On a recent visit to Phnom Penh, David and Velma Knight enjoyed a cruise on the Mekong which included visits to Sien Reap and Angkor Wat.

But the trip wasn't all about cruising and enjoying new sights and sounds and all the different cultures. It was also about catching up with Jessica Manning, our Ambassadorial Scholar from many years ago and with whom David and Velma have always kept in touch. As well as catching up with Jessica, they also caught up with her husband, Matt, and their children Henry and Amelie.

In addition to Jessica's latest bio, which is set out below, she has also  given us two links to the popular media about her recent work (so it's in regular language - not science-medical speak!) 

Jessica Elizabeth Manning, MD MSc
National Institutes of Health

Jessica Manning is an infectious diseases physician-scientist with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who has been working in Southeast Asia since 2012. Originally from Louisiana, she received her undergraduate honors degree in Genetics followed by a graduate diploma in Biomedical Sciences at Wellington University, New Zealand as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar. She attended Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia for her medical degree.

Over the last decade, Dr. Manning has lived and worked in Africa and Southeast Asia with a research focus on the development of new vaccines for mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and malaria. From 2008 to 2009, she served as an NIH Fogarty Scholar in Clinical Research at the Malaria Research and Training Center in Mali, West Africa. Afterwards, as a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School, she completed a Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine residency along with a master’s degree in Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. As part of her training, she lived and worked at community hospitals in Malawi and Rwanda before moving to Thailand to continue malaria research at the Thai-Cambodian border. In 2015, she returned to the USA to complete an infectious diseases specialty fellowship at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

In 2017, she returned to Cambodia to lead NIH’s clinical and translational research efforts aimed at better understanding mosquito-borne diseases in Southeast Asia. She currently serves as Science Attaché at the US Embassy in Phnom Penh and runs collaborative research laboratory and field sites with the Cambodian National Center for Parasitology, Entomology, and Malaria Control.

The two articles that Jessica has provided to give some idea of the work she does are:

Mosquito spit primes your body for disease—so scientists want to make an anti-saliva vaccine, and 

Could A Single Vaccine Prevent Multiple Diseases Spread By Mosquitoes?

 

 

Keeping in touch

 
 
 
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