Jessica Witchley is a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Greg Barton at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering and Biology from MIT in 2010. Following her graduation, she worked in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Reddien as a lab technician until 2012. Her work there focused on discovering the cellular source of ligands that control spatial cNeoblast differentiation in the flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea. She discovered that the source of position control ligands was muscle. Starting in 2012, she enrolled at University of California, San Francisco in the Tetrad graduate program. There, she studied the commensal properties of Candida albicans in the gastrointestinal tract in the laboratory of Dr. Suzanne Noble. She received her PhD in Genetics in 2018. Currently, she is interested in studying mucosal immunity induced by the gastrointestinal commensal microbiota.
