Jessica is a current third year doctoral student in the Bioengineering department under Dr. Doug Weber, where she has been continuing her thesis work in collaboration with Dr. Torregrossa. Since receiving T32 support for her training, Jessica has successfully implemented an electrophysiology setup that allows her to wirelessly record single-unit neural activity in deep brain structures of a rodent, which has allowed her to begin compiling a unique dataset consisting of electrophysiological neural recordings in an awake, behaving rodent during self-administration of a drug of abuse. She is currently working to identify stereotypical patterns of neural activity in rodents during different stages of a self-administration task that is designed to model patterns of cocaine use in humans, and recently presented preliminary findings at a trainee seminar for the Translational Neuroscience Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She will present an update to her current findings as part of a trainee seminar series with the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, with which she has been affiliated since 2018, and aims to submit a completed thesis proposal to the Bioengineering Department in the summer of 2021.