ADJ
My initials—and the small private joke at the beginning of the name.
Sharing Possibilities
Adjivance
Strengthening insight.
Advancing what matters.
Living in accord with one’s own nature.
About Adjivance
Adjivance began with a play on words.
I created the name in 2015, when I retired from Pfizer and began considering what might come next. Its usefulness appealed to me, as did its humor.
Advance
Learning, growth, purposeful movement, and continuing to work at one’s own edge.
Adjuvant
Something that helps make what is already present stronger.
Over time, Adjivance became more than a business name. It came to describe how I work and what I value: seeing what is truly there, revealing what might be possible, and strengthening it without taking it over.
I am a force multiplier.
Antoinette (Ann) Jernigan, DVM, PhD
I am a veterinarian and pharmacologist by training. I spent more than three decades in pharmaceutical research and development, including 21 years at Pfizer in positions of increasing leadership responsibility. My work crossed animal health, human drug discovery, and Comparative Medicine—fields that required scientific rigor, ethical judgment, and respect for the complexity of living beings.
Science, leadership, philosophy, and creativity have never been separate compartments in my life. At different times, one has been more visible than the others, but all have shaped how I observe, question, decide, and create. I am interested in evidence and imagination, achievement and allowing, precision and mystery.
Concepts drawn from Taoism, among other traditions, give me a language for this integration. Ideas such as acceptance and living in accord with one’s own nature reflect what a lifetime of exploration has taught me: patience and observation are not passive. They are ways of seeing more clearly what is present, what is changing, and what may be ready to emerge.
My longstanding interest in animals also connects my scientific and creative work. Sometimes we recognize something in an animal before we are able to recognize it in ourselves. Animals help us to see courage, vulnerability, vigilance, play, patience, power, and fear without the defenses that often accompany human self-examination.
Current work
01
Animal-centered Tarot
Animal nature, traditional Tarot structure, emotional insight, and visual symbolism meet in a complete, interdependent deck and guidebook.
Meet Strength02
The Dystopian World
The series imagines a world reshaped by internal and external forces. AI advances as established systems transform, sometimes even collapsing. The cat enters this changing world as witness, survivor, participant—and, sometimes, comic relief.
Enter the series03
Familiar Subjects. Many Ways of Seeing.
Cats enter familiar masterpieces, horses interpret artistic periods, and scientific ideas—from Mandelbrot sets to plate tectonics—become visual stories.
Explore the collection04
Cats…Just Because
Cats of Another World, Cats and Quilts, The Pink Cats, and More Cats.
Explore the cats05
Wetlands
Sky, birds, flora and fauna. A collection of photographs observing the life and changing light of the wetlands.
Explore the photographsRunning through all of this is a continuing interest in consciousness and sentience: what experience is, which beings may possess it, and how we can approach those questions with both openness and intellectual discipline.
Adjivance is where these threads meet. It is a way of paying attention—closely enough to honor what is present, imaginatively enough to recognize possibility, and gently enough to help that possibility grow without forcing it.
Sharing Possibilities.
Contact
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