Jessica Jones

behavioral neuroscientist | ph.d candidate | uw seattle

Jessica Jones | behavioral neuroscientist ph.d candidate uw seattle

Currently, I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in Dr. John Tuthill’s lab at the University of Washington, and plan to graduate Fall 2025. I am a 2018 UC Santa Cruz alum (go slugs). For two years following my undergraduate career, I worked as a research specialist at the University of Pennsylvania in Dr. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor’s Lab. I developed new, more objective assays, and computational tools to assess acute and chronic pain states in rodent models.

Now, in my graduate career, I hope to develop a strategy to delineate neuronal pathways downstream of Drosophila nociceptors that govern aspects of aversive escape behaviors via optogenetic activation experiments, precise genetic silencing techniques, single-cell RNA sequencing analyses, and comprehensive neural EM circuit reconstruction

Drosophila 3rd instar (staining of ppk-Gal4, Taken by: Bryan Lim (Feng Wei Yu’s Lab)

Notable graduate awards:

more in my CV (2025)