• PhD, University of California - Irvine

I regularly teach undergraduate courses in Scientific Inquiry, Cognitive Psychology, Advanced Research Methods, Neuropsychology, and Psychology and Law.

My research interests are on episodic memory, in particular, the processes of pattern separation and completion, which affect how memories for one-time events are encoded and how the brain deals with interference between similar events. I am also broadly interested in memory phenomena that are relevant to legal settings, such as false memories and eyewitness testimony.

• Lacy, J. W., Nnoka, C., Jock, Z., & Morreale, C. (2026). LLM sentiment quantification reveals selective alignment with human course-evaluation raters. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 10, Article 100545.
• Forney, M. A., & Lacy, J. W. (2022). The effect of offender race/ethnicity on public opinion of appropriate criminal sentences. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 27(2), 283-296.
  
• Trier, H. A., Lacy, J. W., & Marsh, B. U. (2016). Limitations of episodic memory for highly similar auditory stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 28(7), 843-855.
•  Lacy, J. W., & Stark, C. E. L. (2013). The neuroscience of memory: Implications for the courtroom. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14(9), 649-658. doi: 10.1038/nrn3563
•  Stark, S. M., Yassa, M. A., Lacy, J. W., & Stark, C. E. L. (2013). A task to assess behavioral pattern separation (BPS) in humans: Data from healthy aging and mild cognitive impairment. Neuropsychologia, 51(12), 2442-2449. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.12.014
•  Lacy, J. W., & Stark, C. E. L. (2012). Intrinsic functional connectivity of the human medial temporal lobe suggests a distinction between MTL cortices and hippocampus. Hippocampus, 22(12), 2290-2302. doi: 10.1002/hipo.22047
•  Lacy, J. W., Yassa, M. A., Stark, S. M., Muftuler, L. T., & Stark, C. E. L. (2011). Distinct pattern separation related transfer functions in human CA3/dentate and CA1 revealed using high-resolution fMRI and variable mnemonic similarity. Learning & Memory, 18(1), 15-18.
•  Yassa, M. A., Lacy, J. W., Stark, S. M., Albert, M. S., Gallagher, M., & Stark, C. E. L. (2011). Pattern separation deficits associated with increased hippocampal CA3 and dentate gyrus activity in nondemented older adults. Hippocampus, 21(9), 968-979.

• SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Faculty Service
• Barb Ricotta Excellence in Student Service Award, UB Student Association