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 The Rhodes Scholarship is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Established in 1902, it is the oldest graduate scholarship in the world. It is considered among the world' ...

and completed her D.Phil. in zoology at the University of Oxford in 2001. She went to

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

as a researcher before moving to the University of Arizona in 2004.

Career

Masel has published at least 75 peer-reviewed papers. In 2013 she received a research grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study how and where new genes arise. 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 The chicken or the egg causality dilemma is commonly stated as the question, "which came first: the chicken or the egg?" The dilemma stems from the observation that all chickens hatch from eggs and all chicken eggs are laid by chickens. "Chicke ...

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 Exaptation and the related term co-option describe a shift in the function of a trait during evolution. For example, a trait can evolve because it served one particular function, but subsequently it may come to serve another. Exaptations are common ...

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 Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. ( ; May 23, 1875February 17, 1966) was an American business executive in the automotive industry. He was a long-time president, chairman and CEO of General Motors Corporation. Sloan, first as a senior executive and lat ...

Research Fellow, 2007 *

Merton College Merton College (in full: The House or College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, ch ...

Prize Scholarship, 1999 *

, 1997

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Masel, Joanna American evolutionary biologists Australian biologists Alumni of Merton College, Oxford Women evolutionary biologists