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Biography
Jessica Bernard is the director of the Lifespan Cognitive and Motor Neuroimaging Laboratory. Her work seeks to understand how the cerebellum contributes to both motor and cognitive behavior and how it changes with age. The goal of her work is to better characterize cerebellar changes over time with age, in conjunction with understanding how the cerebellum interacts with the rest of the brain. However, there are differences in this structure in older adults, and this is related to how older individuals perform both motor and cognitive tasks. In addition, Bernard is interested in better understanding cerebellar contributions to cognition more broadly. She also has a line of research investigating contributions of the cerebellum to psychosis and the development of psychotic disorders. Bernard earned her bachelor’s in biological psychology from Tufts University, her master’s in psychology from the University of Michigan, her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, and followed with a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado- Boulder.