Joanna Masel

Positions and Education: 

• Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2016-present
• Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2010-2016
• Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2004-2010
• Postdoctoral Researcher, Biological Sciences, Stanford University 2000-2003
• D. Phil. Zoology, Oxford University 2001
• B.Sc. (Hons) University of Melbourne 1996

Honors and Awards: 

• HHMI Professorship runner-up, 2017
• 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
• International Mathematical Olympiad: Bronze Medal, 1991

Professional Service Appointments:

• Senior Editor, Genetics
• Board Member for the Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Population Biology

Research Interests: 

I study foundational questions in evolutionary theory, by building toy models to incorporate mechanistic phenomena within population genetic models, and by applying model insights to bioinformatic data. Some of my central research interests are i) the robustness and evolvability of biological systems, ii) how best to describe fitness in a density-dependent and frequency-dependent world, iii) how does evolution work under high deleterious mutation rates, and iv) how proteins evolve, from the origin of translation ~4 billion years ago to recent de novo gene birth.

Selected Publications: 

1. Smith DJB, Doulcier G, Bourrat P, Takacs P, Masel, J. (2025) Why there are so many definitions of fitness in models, manuscript in revision, https://doi.org/10.32942/X2V61T.
2. Wehbi S, Wheeler A, Morel B, Manepalli N, Minh BQ, Lauretta DS, Masel J. (2024) Order of amino acid recruitment into the genetic code resolved by Last Universal Common Ancestor’s protein domains, PNAS 121: e2410311121 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410311121.
3. Matheson JD, Masel J. (2024) Background selection from unlinked sites causes non-independent evolution of deleterious mutations, Genome Biology & Evolution: evae050 https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evae050.
4. Nelson PG, Masel J. (2017) Intercellular competition and the inevitability of multicellular aging, PNAS 114: 12982–12987 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618854114.
5. Rajon E, Masel J. (2011) Evolution of molecular error rates and the consequences for evolvability, PNAS, 108: 1082-1087 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1012918108.