Welcome to our “Meet the Editors” series, where we interview the editorial team about their work and their relationship to the journal. In this post we meet Professor Joseph A. Jackson, Editor for Parasitology

Firstly, what is your current job title both within Parasitology and outside of the journal? Where are you based in the world?

I am one of the editors at Parasitology, and outside of the journal I am Professor and Chair in Parasitology at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom.

In a few sentences, please describe the focus of your work. Which parasites do you study? What is the goal of your research? What approaches do you use in your work?

I originally started out studying helminths and I am still fascinated by the natural history, ecology and evolution of these organisms. But over the years I have broadened my interests to include other infectious agents and I have also focussed more on the biggest enemy of parasites – the host’s immune system – and how this is regulated by the environment.  

These days, my central research question is how the environment controls the expression of the immune system, and, in turn, how this determines patterns of infection, disease progression and transmission. There is well known be huge individual variation in immune response and infection susceptibility – in humans and in animals – and this plays a key role in determining health. But we do not fully know what causes this variation. It seems to me that understanding how individuals, and their immune systems, interact with the environment will form a big part of the answer.

In terms of the approaches that I use, I like to think of myself as an all-rounder – I work in the field and laboratory, using methods ranging from traditional parasitological techniques through to next generation sequencing.    

When did you first become interested in parasitology as a field? Did a particular teacher or mentor direct your career path?

My parents believed in education and encouraged me to follow my interests. Whilst still at school and then as an undergraduate I started to learn about helminth parasites with extraordinary multi-host life cycles – and belonging to many different species and groups. Moreover, as I used to go shore fishing a lot in those days, I was seeing real-life parasites quite frequently – nematodes or copepods – present on, or in, almost every fish caught – even though the fish seemed otherwise healthy. The existence of this layer of parasitic complexity – intersecting the everyday world of free-living organisms – caught my imagination. It seemed paradoxical (healthy fish with many parasites) and important and sparked some type of (probably partly irrational) fascination that then may have contributed towards me applying specifically for jobs and studentships in parasitology at the end of my degree in 1988. My final year project was a key event – as it probably is for many scientists – and was on the helminth parasites of the five-bearded rockling (a small fish, common on shores in the UK). I have to say that, throughout my career, I have been lucky to work with some great colleagues, who I have learned from and who have helped keep up my enthusiasm for Parasitology and Infection ecology.   

How did you first become familiar with the Parasitology journal?

I first read papers in the journal whilst an undergraduate and then, when I was doing my Ph. D., I used to scan it regularly for useful articles. Probably it was the journal that I read and relied on the most for my Ph. D. studies. I published my first ever paper, with my supervisor, in the journal in 1994.

What is the best part of editing for Parasitology?

The breadth and high quality of the articles – from authors all around the world – makes me feel very enthusiastic about the journal. Reading the scripts as they progress through the review process reminds me of the amazing range of parasites out there to be studied, and of the expertise and resourcefulness of those who study them.  

Do you have any advice for those submitting to Parasitology?

For the field of Parasitology, it would be great to have a higher impact journal targetable by authors with general Parasitology articles – so why not work towards this by sending your best articles to Parasitology!

What advice would you give to early career researchers who are just starting out in parasitology as a field?

I hesitate to give general advice based on my own experience, as the academic science career seems to have changed so much since I started out – and the change has accelerated, if anything. When I started my Ph. D. studies, I was staining flukes in alum carmine, clearing them in xylene and mounting them in Canada balsam for light microscopy. Now I am more likely to be mapping 20 million nucleic acid reads against a genome or assembling a transcriptome. Maybe the advice would be: get ready to be resilient, adaptable and to have to re-think things all the time!