Jessica Payne

Biography

Dr. Jessica Payne is Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where she directs the Sleep, Stress, and Memory (SAM) Lab. Dr. Payne’s research focuses on how sleep and stress independently and interactively influence learning, memory, emotion, and creativity. She teaches various courses in Psychology and Neuroscience, including a popular course entitled “The Sleeping Brain” for which she won Harvard University’s Bok Center Award for teaching excellence and Notre Dame’s Frank O’Malley award for undergraduate teaching and service and Rev. Edmund P. Joyce Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She also won the Laird Cermak Award for her contribution to memory research, the Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, which is “the home for scientists who study how the mind works”, and was elected a Kavil Fellow with the National Academy of Sciences. Kavli fellows are young researchers who have already made recognized contributions to science, and 150 Kavli fellows have been elected into the National Academy of Sciences and 10 have been awarded Nobel Prizes. She was recently selected as the National Academy of Sciences 2021 Seymour Benzer/Sydney Brenner Lecturer. Her postdoctoral fellowship was split between Harvard University’s Psychology Department and Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Arizona