Jessica Cooperstone obtained her B.S. in Food Science from Cornell University in 2009 and her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Food Science and Technology in 2014 investigating factors that may make tangerine tomatoes, orange tomatoes with unique properties are a promising lycopene-containing food to be considered in cancer prevention studies. She was then a Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Scientist at The Ohio State University using mass spectrometry based metabolomics to understand in vivo response to plant food consumption. Jessica joined the faculty at Ohio State as a Discovery Themes Initiate hire in Foods for Health, with a split appointment in Horticulture and Crop Science (70%) and Food Science and Technology (30%) where she resides on the Columbus campus in Howlett Hall. 

The Cooperstone lab is interested in better understanding how factors affect the biosynthesis of phytochemicals and how these compounds affect human health. By better characterizing plants, we can better understand how they affect health while developing novel germplasm designed to test specific nutritional hypotheses. To do this, our group uses a variety of targeted and untargeted metabolomic approaches. To this end, our group is a mix of plant, food and nutrition scientists with diverse experiences and perspectives allowing us to uniquely tackle research challenges.