Jessica Plavicki's flair for the artistic brings out both the beauty and the ugliness of development.
The beauty shows up in her confocal microscopy, which has been on public display including "Tiny: Art From Microscopes at UW-Madison," a show featured on NPR and PBS that was on display at the Dane County Regional Airport in 2009.
The ugliness is in the malformations that result when developing animals are exposed to the environmental contaminant dioxin, a topic she is exploring now as a post-doctoral researcher in the laboratory of Warren Heideman, professor in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Divison and Associate Dean for Research.
"I enjoy confocal microscopy because it gives me the chance to compose images that are artistic as well as informative,'' says Plavicki, who briefly majored in art history, before earning her undergraduate degrees in zoology and psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.
As an undergraduate, she was interested in the developing nervous system, in part because she taught children with autism. She did an undergraduate thesis on sexual and aggressive behavior in Anolis carolinensis (lizards), which explored the neural basis of behavior. Even more impressive, she earned her undergraduate degrees while being a young mother to son, Lennon, now 15.
At UW-Madison, she earned her Ph.D. in the Neuroscience Training Program, researching the function of the homeodomain transcription factor, Distal-less, in Drosophila olfactory neuron development in the laboratory of Grace Boekhoff-Falk, associate professor in the Department of Cell and Regenerative Biology.
She then joined the Heideman laboratory at the School of Pharmacy.
Her work with zebrafish could further our understanding of the genetics underlying the development of the epicardium, which acts as a source of cardiac stem cells. Ultimately, the goal is to aid in the development of strategies for cardiac repair in humans.
"We've found that dioxin exposure prevents the formation of the proepicardial organ and epicardium, and that there is a critical developmental window in which fish are susceptible to the effects of dioxin," says Plavicki, who presented research on the topic at an 7th European Zebrafish Meeting in Scotland in July.
