Jennifer Jeanne Bussell

Presented by Leslie B. Vosshall
B.A., University of Chicago
Abdominal-B Neurons Control Drosophila Virgin Female Receptivity

I am pleased to present Jennifer Bussell to you today. Jennifer hails from South Carolina, where she graduated from the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics on a full scholarship. She moved to Chicago to complete an A.B. with honors in Biological Sciences in 2004. At Chicago, Jen worked in Bruce Lahn’s laboratory on the genetics of the PAR1 gene in humans and primates.

Before coming to Rockefeller, she took two years off from academic life and worked at a management consulting company in Boston. This experience challenged her with real-world problems and how to rock a business suit. While she came to Rockefeller fully intending to work in the area of biochemistry and gene regulation, her interests soon shifted to a fascination with innate behaviors. For her thesis, she set out on a completely independent project that sought to understand how a female chooses a mate. In her case, she focused on the fly Drosophila melanogaster. For the last 100 years, scientists have described almost every aspect of male fly sexual behavior, but largely ignored the female. Jen set out to correct this imbalance and carried out an extremely ambitious and far-ranging thesis project that identified an entirely new female behavior, pausing, which precedes copulation. She pinpointed a set of neurons that control this pausing behavior, and showed that females with these neurons inactivated are aloof and will reject the advances of interested males.

Because my laboratory actually does not work on this problem, Jen was completely on her own to gather reagents, design assays and surmount technical difficulties. Throughout this, Jen was resilient and persistent and had the epic patience to comb through many terabytes of videotapes of flies courting each other. This dedication paid off with an important paper that will publish this summer. Jen will go on to join Richard Axel’s laboratory at Columbia for postdoctoral training later this year to continue her investigations in the mysteries of genes controlling innate behaviors. I join Jen’s parents, friends, Logan and baby Sadie in congratulating her on this special day.