Jacqueline M. Valverde-Villegas, PhD
Woman in Science, working in Genetics and Immunology (Immunogenetics). I study the human immune variability against cancer and inflammatory/chronic conditions through genomic, cellular and statistical analyses.
In SINAPSIS, meeting of Peruvian scientists in Ghent, Belgium, 2019.
About me
I knew I wanted to become an immunogeneticist from the first time I discovered that South American camelids from Peru, like alpacas, have different responses against enterotoxemia or pneumonia, severely impacting one group while another group remains resistant to infection or develops a mild disease. I was fascinated by the immune response variability.
Since then, I have been looking for new opportunities outside my native country to develop my creativity process in science. More than a decade later, I hold a master and doctorate degrees in Genetics and Molecular Biology, working in the HIV field, in the immunogenetics and immunobiology laboratory in Brazil.
My research interests lie within the wide range of inflammatory/infectious diseases, from the host genetic and immunology aspects to complex and multidisciplinary approaches, such as One Health. One of my major interests is to contribute to understanding the host genetic and immune factors of chronic/inflammatory diseases which contribute to developing various disorders in the long-term. In 2020, cancer indirectly changed my life affecting my beloved ones and I was looking for opportunities to contribute with my science to disentangle the impairment of the immune response underlying cancer development. Currently, at Wellcome Sanger Institute, in Cambridge, UK, I am dissecting the different layers of the immune response of individuals with cancer predisposition and building more capabilities in computational methods to dissect single cell genomics data from the blood and its environment, at the population level.
