Janay is a graduate student in the lab of Dr. Kate Reissner and was awarded a two-year NIH F31 Research Fellowship. She received her B.S. in Biology from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 2017. Afterward, Janay worked as a NIH PREP post-bac in the lab of Dr. Joyce Besheer in the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, where she studied neurobiological mechanisms underlying the comorbid relationship of PTSD and alcohol use disorder. Currently, in the Reissner lab, she studies the role of nucleus accumbens core (NAc) astrocytes in cocaine use disorder and cocaine relapse behaviors, and how cocaine-induced changes in NAc astrocyte structure occur.