JESSICA PERRY HEKMAN

As a child, I liked books and languages. I thought I would end up a literature professor. In college, I studied weird languages like Middle Welsh. I concentrated in medieval studies, which, it turned out, was about writing, writing, and more writing... After the dot com bubble burst in 1999, the world of programming was less fun. I started to get bored. I learned tai chi and then started to teach it. But eventually that wasn't holding me, either... Jessica Perry Hekman, DVM, PhD blogs as the Dog Zombie and is fascinated by dog brains. She is a PhD student at the University of Illinois, training in a genomics lab which studies a population of tame foxes. She is a veterinarian with internship training in shelter medicine. Her interests include the stress response in mammals, canine behavior, canine domestication, population and shelter medicine, animal welfare, and open access publishing. She was a programmer in a past life, and is also the Technical Director of ScienceSeeker.

Also known as: dogzombie