Speaker

Jessica Osterhout is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Utah. Her research investigates how the immune system and brain communicate to generate coordinated sickness responses during infection, inflammation, and disease. Jessica earned her PhD at the University of California, San Diego, with Andrew Huberman, where she studied neural circuit development in the mouse visual system, and completed postdoctoral training with Catherine Dulac at Harvard University, where she identified neural mechanisms linking peripheral inflammation to fever and other sickness symptoms. Current and future work in the Osterhout Lab aims to define the cells, signals, and circuits that translate immune activity into changes in brain function and behavior. Her research has been supported by the NINDS, the Klingenstein-Simons Foundation, the Whitehall Foundation, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and the Pew Biomedical Scholars Program.

His lab integrates molecular genetics, metabolism, and systemic physiology to uncover how tumors communicate with and remodel their host environment, locally through immune and stromal interactions, and systemically through effects on distant organs and behavior. His team has defined how KEAP1/NRF2 and LKB1 mutations drive metabolic rewiring and immune evasion in aggressive, treatment-resistant lung cancers.

Most recently, his group discovered a neurophysiological axis of cancer, showing that tumors hijack peripheral sensory neurons and central brain circuits to drive anorexia, sickness behavior, and cachexia, reframing cancer as a systemic disease that exploits brain–body communication to control host metabolism and behavior.

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