Rate My Professor Deborah Anderson

Deborah Anderson, PhD, serves as Professor of Veterinary Pathobiology in the Department of Pathobiology and Integrative Biomedical Sciences within the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, contributing to Agricultural and Veterinary Science. She earned her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of California Los Angeles, completing her doctoral studies from 1994 to 2000. Anderson joined the University of Missouri in 2007 and has since developed an internationally recognized research program centered on Yersinia pestis, the etiological agent of plague. Her investigations examine bacterial virulence mechanisms, flea vector transmission including recent findings on transovarial passage to flea offspring, aerosol transmission, immune evasion through the type III secretion system and pigmentation locus, and host-pathogen interactions driving pneumonic and bubonic plague progression and persistence. As principal investigator, she leads studies with implications for wildlife health and biocontainment, detailed in publications such as those in Nature Microbiology on plague transmission dynamics.

Anderson's prolific publication record features seminal papers on bacterial secretion systems and plague pathogenesis, including 'A mRNA signal for the type III secretion of Yop proteins by Yersinia enterocolitica' (Science, 1997), 'Pseudomonas syringae Hrp type III secretion system and effector proteins' (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2000), 'Two independent type III secretion mechanisms for YopE in Yersinia enterocolitica' (Molecular Microbiology, 1997), 'Toll-like receptor 6 drives differentiation of tolerogenic dendritic cells and contributes to LcrV-mediated plague pathogenesis' (Cell Host & Microbe, 2008), 'Absence of inflammation and pneumonia reveal new role for the pigmentation locus during Yersinia pestis infections' (Infection and Immunity, 2010), and 'Chemokine Receptor CXCR2 Mediates Bacterial Clearance Rather than Neutrophil Recruitment in a Murine Model of Pneumonic Plague' (American Journal of Pathology, 2011). Her work has garnered over 3,662 citations on Google Scholar. In education, she co-instructs graduate courses M7404 Bacterial Pathogenesis and M9001 Structure and Synthesis of Macromolecules. Anderson holds editorial roles as Section Editor for Bacterial Pathogens in Pathogens (MDPI) and guest editor for special issues on Yersinia pestis pathogenicity, virulence factors, and host adaptation. She is a member of the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology graduate program faculty and the American Society for Rickettsiology.