Jennifer Thompson, B.A. '16

Jennifer Thompson, B.A. ’16

Jennifer Thompson ’16 grew up in Seattle, WA, and decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue an undergraduate degree. Because of her Catholic background, she knew she wanted to attend a small school, and LMU's Jesuit values and the 6,000-student population was a perfect fit for her. While at LMU, she found herself taking elective courses that focused on brain and behavior, relationships, and neuropsychology.

After developing a profound interest in psychology, she joined Dr. Thadani's research lab as a paid RA. During her 3.5 years in the lab, she became Lab Manager and worked to quantitatively measure K-12 science teaching practices by coding transcript data. She and the other RAs looked for different types of teacher tasks and questions (TTQs) and then labeled each TTQ category (examples of codes include “Reason” and “Status Check”). Her time in the lab allowed her to understand the research process of reading literature, and develop then implement methods (through many, many hours of coding). She would eventually become an author of a published manuscript developed by Dr. Thadani's research team. Through her involvement in the lab, she gained experience and went on to present at two of LMU’s Undergraduate Research Symposiums.

She currently attends a doctoral program in Clinical Psychology with a specification in Neuropsychology at the University of Houston where she learns about different disorders (e.g., dementia and traumatic brain injury), their impact on cognition, and how to treat them.

She chose the Clinical Psychology program because of the diversity in types of jobs that she could have after graduating with this degree, whether that be a professor, a researcher, or a practicing psychologist. While she does love research, Jennifer has experience working with individuals with dementia and is passionate about interacting with clients and using her knowledge and skillset to improve the lives of patients suffering from debilitating neuropsychological and psychological disorders.

Her ultimate career goal is to be a practicing, licensed Neuropsychologist working in an academic medical center. In a perfect world, Jennifer would spend 50% of her time as the Principal Investigator for research studies looking into healthy aging versus Alzheimer’s disease and dementia and the other 50% of her time seeing patients with these and other neuropsychological disorders in the clinic. She also thinks it would be fun to be a professor in some capacity at some point in her career.