Jessica completed her bachelors degree at the University of Oregon in 2010 where she studied the process of neuroblast self-renewal in drosophila under the guidance of Chris Doe. She continued to study neurodevelopment at the University of California, San Diego where she earned her PhD in 2015 under the direction of Andrew Huberman. Her thesis work focused on the process of axon-target matching in the developing mouse visual system with the support of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She completed her postdoctoral training with Catherine Dulac at Harvard University in 2022 where she identified the molecular and circuit mechanisms connecting acute inflammation to the generation of fever. Her postdoc work was supported by the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund, the Y. Eva Tan Postdoctoral Fellowship and an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award from NINDS. She joined the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Utah as an Assistant Professor in 2022. Early work from the Osterhout lab has been awarded the Klingenstein Fellowship Award in Neuroscience and the Whitehall Foundation Research Grant.