Jessica Osterhout, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the 泫圖弝け of Utah, has been selected as a 2025 Pew Scholar by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences provides funding to early career investigators of outstanding promise whose science is relevant to the advancement of human health. Osterhout will use the four-year award to investigate how the immune system communicates with the brain during sickness.
The Pew really funds people that do exciting work, at the edge of what we know, Osterhout says. To be part of the group is a huge honor.
Osterhout and her team study how the brain and the immune system work together in both sickness and health. We're really fascinated by the idea that the immune-brain communication has such control over the way that we behave, she says. One area of focus for the lab is understanding how the brain recognizes that the body is experiencing an infection and triggers the symptoms that make us feel sick, such as lethargy, fever, or loss of appetite.
It is exciting and fitting that Dr. Osterhout was selected to be a 2025 Pew Scholar. Her innovative work has the potential to transform our understanding of how the immune system activation communicates with the brain to influence behavior during infection.
Those symptoms can make us feel lousy, but they also protect us, encouraging us to conserve energy and stay away from additional pathogens. To trigger those symptoms at the right time, the brain has to know when the body has become sick. Osterhout suspects that brain structures called sensory circumventricular organs (CVOs), which are uniquely positioned to encounter the cells and molecules that circulate in the blood, play a critical role in detecting signals of infection through their interactions with the immune system.
As a postdoctoral researcher, Osterhout discovered how cells in one of the brains CVOs alert the brain to inflammation elsewhere in the body, leading to sickness symptoms including fever, appetite loss, and warmth-seeking behavior. As a Pew Scholar, she will delve more deeply into how CVOs communicate with the immune system to monitor and respond to the bodys state. She plans to examine CVOs throughout the brain, investigating how the cells there might detect and decode information presented by the immune system.
Support from the Pew Charitable Trusts will be vital as her lab digs in to these largely unstudied interactions, Osterhout says. Its really exploratory, she says. Its taking this wild hypothesis and trying to see if its true. That would have been impossible without this [award].
Shes particularly eager to figure out how CVOs discriminate between different kinds of infections, such as bacterial and viral, so the brain can tailor the bodys behavioral and physiological response accordingly. Shes also curious how CVOs interactions with the immune system might impact behavior even in the absence of infection, such as during pregnancy or in times of stress.
It is exciting and fitting that Dr. Osterhout was selected to be a 2025 Pew Scholar, says Monica Vetter, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Neurobiology. Her innovative work has the potential to transform our understanding of how the immune system activation communicates with the brain to influence behavior during infection.