Jessie St. Martin
Name: Jessie St. Martin
Position: Graduate Student
Education: B.S. University of Massachusetts - Boston
Contact: jessiest@brandeis.edu
Hometown: Columbia, CT
Personal Interests: I am a big music fan, and I really like seeing live music. I also like getting out into the great outdoors - and doing stuff like hiking and camping. Nothing beats the view at the top of a mountain! Oh and I love food - and generally whatever involves food (eating it, cooking it, buying it, watching someone cook it on the Food Network, etc).
If I weren't a scientist I'd be… this is a tough one. I'd probably be a high school biology teacher or a pediatrician.
Research Interests: I've always been motivated by knowing that science can have a positive impact on people's lives, and I've always been interested in neuroscience. That's why early on I looked to work in labs that were using basic research to investigate the molecular biology of neuronal disease. As an undergraduate, I worked in Dr. Alexia Pollack's neuropharmacology lab on a project aimed at trying to understand how dopamine agonists affect glutamate receptor expression in the striato-nigral pathway in an animal model of Parkinson's disease. After I graduated, I got the opportunity to continue working on Parkinson's disease research, helping to characterize a new viral-based mouse model of Parkinson's disease while working for Drs. David Standaert and Bradley Hyman at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Afterwards, I was hired to use a similar disease model to begin testing candidate molecules for therapeutic efficacy at FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. While screening compounds for this disease is undoubtedly important, my interests began to turn back to the basic questions of molecular neuroscience, and led me to graduate school here at Brandeis. I've started thinking about broad questions like: how does the brain perceive sensory information? How does this sensory information get 'used' by different parts of the brain? And how do different brain regions form the necessary connections which allow them to share this information? Through the course of my thesis research, I hope to learn more about the molecular mechanisms that govern cortical circuitry, and moreover how the brain functions to process sensory information from the development of neuronal connections to the transmittance of information along a neural pathway.