Draft:Jessica J Connelly

Jessica Connelly is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Dr. Connelly's research studies different phenotypes and human diseases on both the genetic and epigenetic level.

Education
Dr. Jessica Connelly earned her Bachelor's of Science (BS) in Chemistry, with a focus in Biochemistry, at Stockton College of New Jersey, and first began her research journey as a graduate student in 1997 under Dr. John Luchessi. During this time, she was introduced to epigenetics through the study of dosage compensation of Drosophila melanogaster and epigenetics would come to be her field of choice when starting her own lab at the University of Virginia. In 1999, she went on to start her PhD in Genetics at State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she studied under a yeast epigeneticist, Dr. Rolf Sternglanz. In Sternglanz's lab, Connelly's thesis focused on chromatin compaction regulation transcription in histone code. After completing her PhD in 2004, she earned her Postdoctoral degree at Duke University's Center for Human Genetics, during which time she focused on human genetics and genomics. Her mentors during her Postdoctoral degree at Duke University were statistical geneticist, Dr. Elizabeth Hauser, and human genomicist, Dr. Simon Gregory.

Major Contributions
Dr. Connelly's lab studies oxytocin, a neuropeptide, and its receptor. Dr. Connelly focuses on DNA methylation of the oxytocin receptor, and how individual differences contribute to differences in behavior. Her research has demonstrated that blood biomarker can be used to estimate gene methylation and transcription state in the brain in an animal model, and that increased DNA methylation leads to decreased gene expression in human brains. Dr. Connelly's lab is also one of few that work with prairie voles, instead of mice or rats, due to their social monogamy that is so rare in rodents, but parallel with humans.