Jordan Espenshade was born in the United States of America and completed her M.Sc. in Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 2010. After working with the microbiology group at RTI, a non-profit research institute near Raleigh, North Carolina, she obtained her doctoral degree in 2021 from Hasselt University, Belgium.   

She then joined the HIPS in 2022 to study the effects of culture medium composition on specialized metabolite production in myxobacteria. Current projects include contributing to the characterization of the specialized metabolome within the Sorangiineae suborder, making associations between growth media composition and compound production to better understand and manipulate specialized metabolite production, and the development of novel cultivation conditions for natural product isolation.