Adrianna Jenkins

Adrianna (Anna) Jenkins is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on cognitive neuroscience, social cognition, and decision processes, particularly investigating how the prefrontal cortex contributes to social and non-social decision-making under uncertainty. She holds a BA from Dartmouth College, an MA and PhD from Harvard University.

Her work explores the neural mechanisms underlying social perception, uncertainty reduction in social contexts, and contextual flexibility in human behavior. She directs the Jenkins Lab at Penn, which integrates neuroimaging and behavioral experiments to understand social cognition. Her advisees include Shangzan (Sunny) Liu and Ekaterina Goncharova in the Psychology Graduate Program.

Key research themes include neural representations of social traits influencing decisions, effects of uncertainty on exploration vs reward outcomes, and the role of empathy in trade-offs between life quality and duration. Publications span journals like *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, *Cognition*, and *Perspectives on Psychological Science*.