Jensina Davis
PhD Student
Jensina Davis completed her Ph.D. in the Complex Biosystems program at UNL, specializing in Integrated Plant Biology. She defended her dissertation in June 2026 and received her degree in mid-August 2026. She earned her B.S. in Agronomy and Seed Science with a minor in Statistics from Iowa State University in May 2022. Originally from Brookings, SD, she completed several internships with companies in the agriculture industry during her training and is passionate about advancing sustainability in agriculture using computational and statistical research methods.
In the News
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Jensina's PhD Dissertation Exam
Congratulations to Jensina Davis on successfully passing her PhD dissertation exam and earning the PhD title. We wish her continued success in her research and future endeavors. -
Jensina Davis speaks at Maize Genetics Conference
Jensina Davis presented her work on rapid prototyping of field imaging systems and AI image embeddings to map genes controlling plant disease responses at the Maize Genetics Conference in Köln, Germany. -
Schnable Lab at NAPPN Conference
Jensina Davis and Karla Cuéllar spoke at the NAPPN conference in East Lansing, Michigan. -
Three students receive IANR fellowships
Three students in our lab were honored as UNL graduate fellowship recipients. Congratulations to Jensina Davis (Hardin Fellow), Nikee Shrestha, and Sofiya Arora (Widaman Fellows). -
Nebraska Corn outreach
Jensina, Sofiya, and Harshita had the chance to meet with members of the Nebraska Corn Growers Association and talk about their work on lab projects related to crop breeding, optimizing nitrogen use, and using artificial intelligence to study leaf diseases in new ways. -
UNL-Bayer Hackathon
Ryleigh Kirby, Harshita Mangal, Sofiya Arora, Jensina Davis, Hadiya Kounsar, Ozgur Altundas, Amany Gomaa, and Karla Cuéllar joined the Bayer Agriculture Data Hackathon, where Sofiya’s team won first place, Hadiya and Ryleigh’s team took second, Jensina’s team placed third, and Ozgur’s team earned the social engagement award.
Recent Publications
- (2026) Distinct effects of domestication and improvement on genetic load and nitrogen-response variation in sorghum. doi: 10.64898/2026.04.28.721488 bioRxiv doi: 10.64898/2026.04.28.721488 Preprint
- (2026) Embeddings from standardized sorghum leaf images capture variation in disease response that human scoring misses. bioRxiv doi: 10.64898/2026.09.21.753202 bioRxiv doi: 10.64898/2026.09.21.753202 Preprint
- (2025) 3D reconstruction enables high-throughput phenotyping and quantitative genetic analysis of phyllotaxy. Plant Phenomics doi: 10.1016/j.plaphe.2025.100023 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.10.03.616344
- (2025) Assessing the impact of yield plasticity on hybrid performance in maize. Physiologia Plantarum doi: 10.1111/ppl.70278 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2025.01.21.634104
- (2025) Plot-level satellite imagery can substitute for UAVs in assessing maize phenotypes across multistate field trials. Plants, People, Planet doi: 10.1002/ppp3.10613 agriRxiv doi: 10.31220/agriRxiv.2024.00251
- (2024) Sorghum segmentation and leaf counting using an in silico trained deep neural model. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.70002
- (2024) Population level gene expression can repeatedly link genes to functions in maize. The Plant Journal doi: 10.1111/tpj.16801 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2023.10.31.565032