Jacob Musser is an Assistant Professor in the department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University.
Jacob grew up in northern Michigan, spending his free time birdwatching and roaming the wilderness along the Lake Superior shoreline. He earned his B.S. at the University of Minnesota, PhD at Yale, and conducted postdoctoral studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in the lab of Dr. Detlev Arendt. A major focus of Jacob’s research is understanding how animals invent new types of cells and tissues. In his doctoral work, he discovered genetic changes important in the origins of bird feathers. Later, as a postdoc he pioneered the study of sponges to learn about the earliest stages of animal evolution, finding that the first animal brains may have evolved to regulate feeding and microbial interactions. In 2023 Jacob established his lab at Yale University to investigate the origin and evolution of animal cell types, and the functional division of labor intrinsic to animal multicellular life.
