Dr. Jester is Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Michigan Addiction Research Center (UMARC), Department of Psychiatry. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1994 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute thereafter. In 1997 she changed scientific direction, moving into a career in developmental psychology with a specialization in developmental psychopathology. Following additional postdoctoral training and research in developmental psychology in the Department of Psychology, Wayne State University, she moved to the University of Michigan in 2000, where she has been studying factors that influence the development of risk for problem drinking and other substance abuse. Her research has focused on environmental effects of parent drinking on children's development, trajectories of alcoholism symptoms in adults, trajectories of behavior problems throughout childhood and adolescence and the relationship of those trajectories to the onset of substance use in late adolescence. A special feature of the work has been the utilization of newly developed longitudinal statistical methods—in particular, latent variable mixture modeling, in the characterization of risk development Dr. Jester’s main interests are in 1) the relationship of parenting and other socioenvironmental factors to the development of problematic behaviors in childhood and adolescence and 2) early interventions to ameliorate the effects of high-risk environments on child development.

 

Email: jjester@umich.edu
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)