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.
PhD in Neuroscience, 2024
Oregon Health & Science University
BS in Psychology, 2014
University of California, Davis
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Cerebellum means "little brain" in Latin. It is a structure that sits at the base of the brain and has long been known to be important for smooth body movements but has more recently been recognized as important for cognition and emotion. Cerebellar cortex is made up of large Purkinje neurons and small basket and stellate cells. Together, these cells form a sterotyped circuit that is repeated throughout the structure.