Jessica Osterhout, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University 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.
鈥淭he Pew really funds people that do exciting work, at the edge of what we know,鈥 Osterhout says. 鈥淭o be part of the group is a huge honor.鈥
Osterhout and her team study how the brain and the immune system work together in both sickness and health. 鈥淲e're really fascinated by the idea that the immune-brain communication has such control over the way that we behave,鈥 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 brain鈥檚 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 body鈥檚 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. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really exploratory,鈥 she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 taking this wild hypothesis and trying to see if it鈥檚 true. That would have been impossible without this [award].鈥
She鈥檚 particularly eager to figure out how CVOs discriminate between different kinds of infections, such as bacterial and viral, so the brain can tailor the body鈥檚 behavioral and physiological response accordingly. She鈥檚 also curious how CVOs鈥 interactions with the immune system might impact behavior even in the absence of infection, such as during pregnancy or in times of stress.
鈥淚t is exciting and fitting that Dr. Osterhout was selected to be a 2025 Pew Scholar,鈥 says Monica Vetter, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Neurobiology. 鈥淗er innovative work has the potential to transform our understanding of how the immune system activation communicates with the brain to influence behavior during infection.鈥