Jessica Lauren Zung, Ph.D.

Jessica Zung is a postdoctoral research scientist at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. She currently studies visual feature processing in Drosophila flies in the laboratory of Dr. Gwyneth Card. Prior to arriving at Columbia, she completed a Ph.D. in ecology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience at Princeton University under the supervision of Dr. Carolyn McBride and earned a B.Sc. in ecology, evolutionary biology, and physiology from the University of Toronto.

Zung is broadly interested in understanding how neural circuits evolve to drive complex behaviors. Her doctoral research focused on the evolution of mosquito host preference and the chemistry of human and animal odor. She found that human body odor is unusually enriched in certain compounds produced by the oxidation of unique human skin lipids. A collaborative study revealed that human-preferring mosquitoes have a set of olfactory neurons that are especially sensitive to these compounds. In her postdoctoral work, Zung aims to take advantage of the wealth of tools available for Drosophila neuroscience to study how flies process visual features and how the underlying neural circuits evolve.