Jessica Spinelli

Jessica B. Spinelli, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Program in Molecular Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Freeman Hrabowski Scholar. Her laboratory studies how mammalian cells sense and adapt to metabolic stress, with a particular focus on mitochondrial biology, the electron transport chain, and metabolic flexibility in cancer and other disease settings.

Dr. Spinelli earned her PhD in Chemical Biology from Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Her research has uncovered alternative pathways that allow mitochondria to function under low-oxygen conditions and is helping identify new strategies to reprogram cellular metabolism.

She was named a Searle Scholar in 2023, and her work has been published in leading scientific journals, including Science and Nature.