Terry Jernigan
Terry Jernigan is Professor of Cognitive Science, Psychiatry, and Radiology at UC San Diego. She earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology at UC Los Angeles, and interned, practiced, and conducted post-doctoral research at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center and Stanford University before joining the faculty at UC San Diego in 1984. She is Director, UCSD Center for Human Development, where she works with an interdisciplinary team conducting research focused on the factors that influence behavioral and brain development in children. She currently serves on the National Advisory Board on Drug Abuse and is a regular consultant for several of the National Institutes of Health. She is a member of the scientific advisory boards of several research organizations and is on the editorial boards of several journals focusing on neuropsychology or neuroimaging.
Research Focus
Dr. Jernigan’s research has focused on a broad range of topics, including postnatal brain development, the neural bases of learning and memory, neurodevelopmental disorders, neuropsychiatric disorders, and brain aging. She served as PI of a multi-site developmental imaging-genomics study that involved genome-wide genotyping, brain imaging, and cognitive assessments in 1400 children across 9 US sites and now offers these data publicly to the research community. In addition, she is PI of longitudinal studies of cognitive and brain development in young children. Her major research interests at present focus on the dynamic developmental processes that give rise to human behavioral phenotypic variability, including in academic phenotypes – and on how these processes are impacted by genetics, experience, disease, substance exposure, and other risks such as preterm birth.
Clinical Focus
Dr. Jernigan has been licensed as a clinical psychologist since 1983, and she practiced clinical neuropsychology at the San Diego VA Healthcare System for over 2 decades.
