Jeff Liesch

Presented by Leslie B. Vosshall
B.S., University of Maryland–College Park
The Neuropeptide Regulation of Host-seeking Behavior
in Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes

I am pleased to present Jeff Liesch to you today. Jeff came to Rockefeller with impressive research credentials, real-world experience in industry, and letters that raved about how smart, organized and effective he was. Indeed, Jeff is extremely smart, organized and effective, and in my lab he kick-started our mosquito research program at a time when he was the only person working on this creature.

He graduated from the University of Maryland–College Park with high honors. Jeff’s thesis project in Caren Chang’s plant laboratory established the roundworm C. elegans as a model system and won the award for best undergraduate thesis. After graduating from college, Jeff took a few years off to carry out atmospheric research on an NOAA research vessel in Maine and worked in industry as a media and web consultant. In my laboratory, Jeff was the first to figure out how to get mosquitoes to behave, by which I mean that he designed and built assays in which mosquitoes would tell us how attracted they are to a given human.

As chance would have it, Jeff is among the most attractive humans (to mosquitoes) ever to work in the lab. Jeff was on the hunt for the genes that cause a female mosquito to switch into a long-term state of ignoring humans after she takes a blood-meal. His thesis work identified a family of neuropeptide receptors that is important for modulating mosquito behavior: he systematically cloned these genes, matched receptors to the peptides that activate them, and made a mutation in one of these receptors.

Throughout his thesis work, Jeff impressed me with his precise thinking, incredible technical skills and collegiality. He tracked the detailed progress of every element of his thesis with project planning software — which was an impressive and unusual thing to see in an academic research laboratory. Jeff is also an amazingly nice person and was a pleasure to have as a colleague. Jeff recently transitioned to the private sector and is applying his smart, organized, and effective self to work as a senior consultant in health sciences at Navigant.

I join his family, friends, Josefina (his brand-new fiancée) and Lola (their dog) in congratulating Jeff on a fantastic performance as a scientist here.