Graduate Student
Jessica Burke is broadly interested in the neural mechanisms of social communication systems. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 with a degree in Neuroscience where she did her undergrad thesis with Marc Schmidt investigating the non-auditory streams that provide sensory feedback to singing birds. After graduating, she stayed on as a technician in Marc's lab where she helped set up a new study system, the brown-headed cowbird. Jessica used the non-singing females in this wild-caught species to show that the song system exists in non-singing female songbirds, and looks forward to figuring out how this circuit might be involved in female preference in zebra finches during her time in the Gadagkar lab.