In Fall 2021 when Jesse joined the lab to pursue her MS I was already starting to get a little worried about accepting so many students in such a short time (you’ve already read about Luberson and Sabiha to started the summer before). So I was excited to take on an MS student and have someone graduate before I went up for tenure. Well I was pleasantly surprised when about a month in to her MS, Jesse decided she would rather do a PhD since she was enjoying research so much. So here I was with four PhD students in a lab that was only 1.5 years old.

The amazing thing about Jesse is that she jumped in with both feet and head first (if that’s possible) to work on every project she was interested in. Starting out working on auditory projects, she was able to contribute to two papers on hearing in our new prairie vole colony. One characterizing how they hear: https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/155/1/555/3061584. The other comparing how wild caught voles compared to our lab-reared colony https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0335120

Very quickly though it also became clear that Jesse’s background in reproduction was going to be an important part of her dissertation work. While working with the voles she decided to take a gander at their testes and noticed that the paired animals had significantly larger testes than naive males. This quickly morphed into her entire dissertation which she published in Hormones and Behavior: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X25001059?casa_token=y52N4RvlQWAAAAAA:zlYRpVphgtBIRdJBdQZU4wiAO51a9qJwgKLzI_pCQYjwLWJh83XuD_sJY3-vw9PXzqYjV5RNPEY. She hopefully still has two more papers that will come out related to this work – one in collaboration with SRTP vet student Kate Watts.

Lastly she has also taken on many side projects including estrogen-depletion and supplementation on behavior in mice, and helping everyone in the lab on their projects. I know all of her undergrads have always appreciated her dedication to their training. In addition she recruited many undergrads to the lab with her sensational teaching abilities through her TAship when she wasn’t supported by her NIH G-Rise fellowship (which was unfortunately canceled with other government science cuts).

I am so excited to see what you are up to next and I know you are going to be an amazing teacher and researcher where you end up. Anyone looking to hire an phenomenal teacher and researcher would do well to take Jesse.