Student Profiles

As a lifelong hemophiliac, Jackson has always been curious about the causes of disease. As an undergraduate, he found a professor, Dr. Nathan Wright, a structural biologist and biophysicist, who was concerned with just that, but on a molecular level. After a brief meeting with Dr. Wright that began with him shoving a pipette in his hand and ended with “see you tomorrow”, Jackson joined the Wright lab. Throughout undergrad, Jackson worked to discern the role of a giant cytoskeletal protein, obscurin, in differential subtypes. Previous work by the lab and others have shown that obscurin plays a major role in force transduction in striated muscle cells. Leaning on the Wright lab’s command of biophysics and the molecular biology and microscopy expertise of a close collaborator, Dr. Daniel Conway, Jackson was able to show that when expressed in breast and epithelial tissue, obscurin’s structure-function relationship is likely conserved. His work landed him presentations at two Biophysical Society Meetings and the Biomedical Engineering Annual meeting as well as the JMU Biochemistry Research Award and JMU Frank A. Palocsay Award in Undergraduate Chemistry Research.

After catching the bug for clinically relevant research and advanced technologies, Jackson headed to Boston, where he began a research associate position at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the Proteomics Platform. The lab, captained by Dr. Steven A. Carr, is well known for deploying mass spectrometry within a variety of contexts to reveal insights otherwise left shrouded by genomic techniques alone. Jackson spearheaded the Carr lab’s data collection contributions to the National Cancer Institute’s Clinical Proteogenomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC). He has generated numerous multi-dimensional data sets for several non-small cell lung cancer cohorts, oligodendroglioma, and adult soft tissue sarcoma. Additionally, he advanced the Carr lab’s technological capabilities, resulting in a new semi-automated high-throughput workflow for highly precious, tissue limited samples. 

As a NIH Oxford scholar, he plans to study the impact of mechanosensitive genes on transcription and translation in the vascular and lymphatic systems in zebrafish.

Read more about Jackson at https://www.rdm.ox.ac.uk/people/jackson-white