Keith Jarosinski’s research spans multiple aspects of herpesvirus-induced cancers, including host-to-host transmission, latency, transformation, and reactivation, using Marek’s disease virus (MDV) in chickens as a natural translational animal model. Most herpesviruses do not cause cancer in humans and animals. Still, they occasionally can, including Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Kaposi sarcoma caused by Epstein-Barr and Kaposi sarcoma-associated viruses in humans. MDV uses similar mechanisms to induce lymphocytic cancers in chickens. His lab tries to understand how herpesviruses influence the transformation of lymphocytes that result in cancer to develop drugs or treatments to stop the development of cancer with these viruses.
Keith came to Illinois in August 2016 after completing a BS in Biotechnology from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the State University of NY (SUNY) Health Science Center in Syracuse, NY (now Upstate Medical University) in 1999. After completing his Ph.D., he spent 12 years at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in Dr. Karel A. Schat’s laboratory as a USDA-funded post-doctoral fellow (1999-2003) and Research Associate (2003-2008) and then went on to become a Senior Research Associate (2008-2011) in Dr. Nikolaus Osterrieder’s laboratory.
Before coming to Illinois, Jarosinski spent five years (2011-2016) at the University of Iowa as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the Carver College of Medicine.