Jessica is a Kanzer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Card Lab at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University. She caught the research bug as a University of Toronto undergraduate while studying bumble bee behaviour and distribution at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, and she has been fascinated by insect behaviour ever since. During her PhD with Dr. Carolyn McBride in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, she studied the evolution of human-specialist Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, focusing on the chemistry of human and animal odours. As a postdoc, Jessica has switched her research focus from mosquito olfaction to Drosophila fly vision. She is exploring how visual information is processed by special feature-detecting neurons and their downstream partners. Throughout her scientific career, Jessica has been especially drawn to studying both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of natural animal behaviours, striving to understand their mechanistic basis as well as their ecological and evolutionary context. When not in the lab, she enjoys spending her time biking, cooking, and woodworking.