Joanna Masel

Joanna Monti-Masel (also known as Joanna Masel) is an American theoretical evolutionary biologist. Since 2016 she has been a full professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. She studies the question of evolvability, namely, why evolution works given that mutations to working systems will usually be detrimental to their function.

Early life

Masel was raised in Melbourne, Australia. She was educated at the University of Melbourne, taking her B.Sc. in 1996. She was awarded the 1997 Rhodes Scholarship and completed her D.Phil. in zoology at the University of Oxford in 2001. She went to Stanford University as a researcher before moving to the University of Arizona in 2004. She runs a theoretical group in the University of Arizona's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department where she investigates aspects of evolvability.

Masel argues that the conventional account of the origin of new genes, namely that they are commonly duplicated from old genes and then evolve to diverge from them, is a chicken and egg explanation, since a functional gene would have to exist before a new function could evolve. She suggests instead that new genes are born continually from non-coding DNA, a form of preadaptation.

Books

Bypass Wall Street: A Biologist's Guide to the Rat Race, Perforce Publishing, 2016

Awards and distinctions

Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2012–13 Outstanding Faculty Mentor, Honorable Mention, University of Arizona Undergraduate Biology Research Program, 2011 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, 2007 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, 2007 Merton College Prize Scholarship, 1999 Rhodes Scholarship, 1997