Kristina Kelesy

Kristina recently graduated from Purdue University where she received her PhD in Chemistry.  Her graduate research focused on finding a novel resistance-reduced treatment for malaria, a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite that is spread through the bite of an infected mosquito.  Following her discovery of a promising malaria treatment, Kristina traveled to Vietnam (2013) and Uganda (2014) to perform studies on fresh malaria infected blood samples to confirm its effectiveness and then traveled back to Vietnam (2015) to spearhead and oversee the human clinical trial that resulted from her discovery.  Continuing in the field of infectious disease research, Kristina accepted a position at Purdue in the Biochemistry Department as a postdoctoral researcher in the Mesecar lab, a structural biology laboratory that focuses on discovering and validating new drug targets against cancer and deadly viruses, such as MERS and SARS.  She hopes to combine the research skills learned during her PhD and in the Mesecar lab to facilitate the development of novel drug targets against malaria.