Welcome to the Jernigan lab web page
I am accepting graduate students for the Fall 2026 semester!
Deadline to apply is Dec. 15th, 2025
See the below link for more information about the Biology graduate programs at Wake Forest University:  https://biology.wfu.edu/graduate/

Jernigan lab: Experience dependent plasticity of perception

The Jernigan Lab is located at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, USA. The research in this lab primarily focuses on how experience shapes the way animals respond to the world around them, and seeks to better understand why animal A may respond differently than animal B to a given stimulus. The lab employs a large number of techniques primarily working with social insects to explore how experience affects perception.

Most of the work in the lab will focus on the development, identity, and tuning of a patch of cells, akin to primate face cells, I discovered during my postdoc in the brain of Polistes fuscatus. These wasps possesses individual facial identity recognition of conspecifics. The lab seeks to study the development of these cells, how they gain their selective tuning, as well as further characterize the visual and sensory biology of these animals with the ultimate goal of understanding how their brains recognize and discriminate nestmates, strangers, friends, enemies, etc.