Jessica received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, where she had her first experiences with both research and psychiatric illness. Seeing a need for psychiatric research to develop better treatments, she began the MD/PhD program at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX. She received her PhD in Integrative Biology from UT Southwestern, where she studied the role of Notch signaling in adult hippocampal neurogenesis in the laboratory of Amelia Eisch, PhD. After finishing her PhD, Jessica went to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to complete her MD. Instead of immediately entering residency, Jessica then went to work as a postdoctoral associate at the Rockefeller University, under the joint guidance of Ines Ibanez-Tallon, PhD and Nathaniel Heintz, PhD. Her research was focused on identifying pathways in the habenula-interpeduncular circuit that were regulated by chronic nicotine. Using translational affinity profiling (TRAP), she found that the interpeduncular nucleus utilized retrograde signaling to the habenula via nitric oxide to regulate preference for nicotine, recently published in PNAS. Jessica then returned to Mount Sinai to complete a residency in Psychiatry. She is currently continuing her work on the habenula-interpeduncular circuit in the lab of Paul Kenny, PhD, both in relation to nicotine reward and withdrawal and to the cognitive and affective complications of diabetes.
