Jennifer Jahncke

Jennifer Jahncke

Postdoctoral Scholar

Oregon Health & Science University

About Me

Jennifer is a postdoc in the Wright Lab at the Vollum Institute at Oregon Health & Science University. Under the mentorship of Dr. Kevin Wright she studies the role that the scaffolding protein dystroglycan plays in the structure and function of inhibitory synapses in the brain. Her goal is to further our understanding of the cognitive symptoms that are experienced by dystroglycanopathy patients. Jennifer is also interested in data science and science communication. In her free time Jennifer can be found hiking, crocheting, making art, and petting dogs.

Education

  • PhD in Neuroscience, 2024

    Oregon Health & Science University

  • BS in Psychology, 2014

    University of California, Davis

Projects

Science Communication - Science for non-scientists.

Science Around Us - Science is all around us. Learn about concepts in mathematics and neuroscience through the medium of photography and graphic design.

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Limits

I used to tutor calculus. People really struggle with limits and asymptotes. Asymptotes occur where your function is approaching either positive or negative infinity. This happens when the function is “undefined”.

The Penis Girl Observer

Self isolation during the COVID19 pandemic lockdown has impacted us all differently. A lot of us are baking bread and raising sourdough starters. Some of us (ie. me) are becoming collectors of graffiti tags.

Gradient Field

To help us visualize 3D functions, there are methods to bring the function down a dimension to give you a little taste of how it’s behaving. One of these methods is gradient fields.

Immunohistochemistry: Adding Color to the Brain

Have you ever wondered how we make these bright and beautiful images of proteins in the brain? It’s done using a technique called immunohistochemistry, which we also call IHC or immuno.

Cortical Connections

The cortex of a human brain is complicated. It’s broken into 6 layers, of which several are broken down further into sublayers. Layer 4 receives primary input from lower brain areas.

Joint Probability

A and B are two separate events, but not necessarily completely separate. Sometimes A and B can happen together. The probability of that occurring is given by \(P(A \cap B)\): the joint probability.

Arc Length

Math is everywhere. Here, the wilted shrub forms an arc. Draw a triangle with the tangent line as the hypotenuse, \(\Delta x\) as the base, and \(\Delta y\) as the height.

Area

Finding the area under one curve involves taking the integral of that curve over the interval of interest: \(\int_{a}^{b}{f(x)dx}\). If you want to find the area between two curves ($f(x)$ and \(g(x)\)), you start by taking the integral of the top curve and subtract from that the un-wanted area - the area under the bottom curve.

Center Surround

The back of your retina is lined with light-sensitive rods and cones. These photoreceptors catch the light and send the light information to bipolar cells, who then send it to retinal ganglion cells (RGCs).

A Thread: Molecular Mechanisms of Non-ionotropic LTD

Preprint featuring one of the projects I worked on during my time as a research assistant! Here we start to put together the molecular signaling pathway downstream of non-ionotropic LTD and spine shrinkage.

Recent Posts

Neurohackademy 2023: Calculating an Author's O-Index

Neurohackademy is an annual two-week long course offered at University of Washington in Seattle. The course covers some coding basics (python) and applications to neuroimaging. I attended the course in 2023 hoping to get some more neuroscience-centered coding experinece.

Heart Beats on Our Wedding Day

I love data, so I wanted to somehow plot my wedding day. My now-husband wore his Fitbit on his wrist and I wore mine on my ankle (you can see it in the picture below).

Reviewer Randomizer Shiny App

Last month I wrote a simple python script to help my graduate program to randomly assign reviewers to applicants during application season. Since writing that script I have (1) updated the script to make sure each applicant has at most one trainee reviewer and make sure that the division of labor is distributed equally and (2) built a python shiny app that I’ve deployed on shinyapps.

Application Season: Randomly Assigning Reviewers

My PI recently proposed a little side project for me: could I use my recently refreshed python skills to write a little code that would take in a list of applicants and a list of reviewers and randomly assign 3 reviewers to each applicant?

Introduction Into Web Scraping with Portland Burger Week

I take the Portland food weeks very seriously. My partner and I make a list of our must-trys and then I make out plan of attack. We usually hit up 2-3 places a night until we’ve exhausted all the places that we wanted to try.

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