This user has not added any information to their profile yet.
Jessica’s background in behavioral neuroscience originally focused on learning and memory as it relates to addiction. She has published several papers examining the effects of nicotine administration and withdrawal from chronic nicotine to better alleviate the “fog” effect many
users feel while trying to quit smoking. She was also interested in people taking nicotine as a possible way to self-medicate because a larger percentage of people diagnosed with mental disorders such as schizophrenia and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) consume nicotine products at a higher rate than compared to the general population. For her doctorate dissertation work, Jessica focused on a transitive inference task ( if A >B and B>C, then A>C), a task for which some diagnosed with schizophrenia show poorer performance. She found this task relies on specific areas of the hippocampus. Furthermore, mice with a genetic mutation related to how nicotine has its effects in the brain also performed poorer in this task compared to control mice.
After completing her doctorate, Dr. André continued her research at Yale University working to better understand the underlying mechanisms that cause the symptoms observed in obsessive compulsive disorder and Tourette’s syndrome. Genetically modified animal models were excellent tools to uncover both the genes as well as the neural circuits which were altered in people diagnosed with these disorders. The findings from these studies suggest that the compulsions observed in these and other related disorders are the result of abnormally formed
habits.
After her postdoc, Jessica spent a few years teaching exclusively. She taught at both the college level and working with younger students through on ground and remote precollege and gifted summer programs. She joined the University of Bridgeport in Fall 2021.
Ph.D. Psychology/Neuroscience, Temple University
B.S. Biology and Psychology, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Lee, A.S., André, J.M., Pittenger, C. (2014) Lesions of the dorsomedial striatum delay spatial learning and render cue-based navigation inflexible in a water maze task in mice. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13 Feb, 8:42.
André, J.M., Cordero, K.A., Gould, T.J. (2012) Comparison of the performance of DBA/2 and C57BL/6 mice in transitive inference and foreground and background contextual fear conditioning. Behavioral Neuroscience, 126:249-57.
Gould, T.J., Portugal, G.S., André, J.M., Tadman, M.P., Marks, M.J., Kenney, J.W., Yildirim, E., Adoff, M. (2012) The duration of nicotine withdrawal-associated deficits in contextual fear conditioning parallels changes in hippocampal high affinity nicotinic acetylcholine receptor upregulation. Neuropharmacology 62: 2118-25.
André, J.M., Leach, P.T., Gould, T.J. (2011) ) Nicotine ameliorates NMDAR antagonist-induced deficits in contextual fear conditioning through high affinity nAChRs in the hippocampus. Neuropharmacology 60:617-25.
Drowos, D.B., Berryhill, M., André, J.M., & Olson, I.R. (2010). True memory, false memory, and subjective recollection deficits after focal parietal lobe lesions. Neuropsychology 24:465-75.
André, J.M., Gulick, D., Portugal, G.S., & Gould, T.J. (2008). Nicotine withdrawal disrupts both foreground and background contextual fear conditioning but not pre-pulse inhibition of the acoustic startle response in C57BL/6 mice. Behavioral Brain Research 190: 174-181.