Jessica L. Fetterman, PhD

Biography

Jessica L. Fetterman, PhD, is a basic and translational scientist studying the intersections of mitochondrial physiology, mitochondrial genetics, and cardiovascular disease. She is a member of the Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute, a member of the Genome Science Institute, and an ancillary member of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Boston University. She is a Framingham Heart Study Investigator and Fellow of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Fetterman leads a research program focused on studying the role and mechanisms of mitochondrial genetics in cardiovascular pathophysiology using population-level genetics approaches, mechanistic studies in human induced pluripotent stem cells differentiated to cardiovascular cells, and multiomics and systems biology approaches in biobanked human samples. A key barrier in the field is the limited literature studying mitochondrial genetics in human cardiovascular cells and tissues. To facilitate such efforts, her team has developed and published a protocol for biobanking of whole human hearts preserved to maintain the spatial resolution for multiomics, which served as the basis for a funded multi-PI R01 with Deepa M. Gopal, MD, MS, to establish the Framingham Heart Study Cardiovascular Biobank, a program they co-direct called the Lifelong Endowment for Genomic and Cellular DiscoverY (LEGACY).

Her team has ongoing studies manipulating mitochondrial genes implicated in mitochondrial cardiomyopathies and heart failure in human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes. Relatedly, she received a Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award for an innovative approach to targeting nucleotide sequences into mitochondria, a key barrier to the implementation of CRISPR-Cas systems on the mitochondrial genome. The team is also working on creating novel bioinformatics pipelines to enhance our ability to delineate pathogenic and benign variants and to enable the investigation of mitochondrial-nuclear genetic interactions.

She has directly mentored 40 high school students, undergraduates, PhD candidates, medical students, residents, fellows, and early-career faculty, of whom 17 are from groups underrepresented in science and medicine, who have published >39 papers. She has led two American Heart Association fellowship programs. Dr. Fetterman was recognized for her deep commitment to mentorship with the Boston University Department of Medicine Junior Faculty Mentoring Award.