Meet the Team

Jacob Musser, PhD
Assistant Professor
Jake earned his BS from the University of Minnesota, PhD from Yale, and conducted postdoctoral studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. In 2023, he established his lab at Yale University to investigate the origins of animal life and the deep evolutionary history of our nervous system.

Kejue Jia, PhD
Associate Research Scientist
Kejue is an associate research scientist in the MCDB department at Yale studying cell type and gene module evolution. He earned his PhD in computational biology with minors in applied math and statistics from Iowa State University with a focus on protein coevolution and homolog detection.

Jamie Maziarz
Research Associate
Jamie received her B.S. in Forensic Science and Biology and her M.S. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of New Haven. She is now a Research Associate in the Musser lab and interested in the evolution of cell types in animals.

Oscar Solberg '28
Undergraduate Researcher
Oscar is a second-year undergraduate at Yale University majoring in Philosophy and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In the Musser Lab, Oscar studies the composition and development of sponge microbiomes. When not in the lab, Oscar plays bass and piano and enjoys reading and working out.

Dominica Cao
PhD Candidate
Dominica received their B.A.s from Smith College and conducted postgraduate research at Yale University. They joined the Musser group as a Gruber Fellow to study the evolution of animal body plans, with particular interest in how it intersects with organismal development, evolution, and theory.

Sean Liu
Undergraduate Researcher '26
Sean is a fourth-year undergraduate at Yale University majoring in Neuroscience and Evolutionary Biology. He previously studied cytoskeletal protein dynamics and is now investigating the evolution of cell type-specific cytoskeletal regulation in the Musser Lab.

Sarah Gottfredson Morgan
PhD Candidate
Sarah joined the lab as a PhD student to study the microbiome of freshwater sponges. She is very passionate about microorganisms of all kinds. When she is not in the lab she is looking for rocks, watching animal documentaries, gaming, or sleeping.

Roy Zang
PhD Candidate
Roy received his B.M.Sc. in Microbiology & Immunology w/ Pathology and M.Sc. in Microbiology & Immunology from Western University in Canada. He is currently disentangling how proteins and organelles became integrated as part of cell-cell communication pathways to coordinate multicellular physiology.

Kathryn Boit Hebert
PhD Candidate
Kat received her A.B. in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology from Harvard University and is now a Yale BBS doctoral student. She loves microscopy and uses this tool in the lab to answer questions about the evolution and development of animal tissue.

Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma
PhD Student - Rotation
Miranda is a paleontologist and a PhD student in Yale’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department, where she studies tetrapod skeletal evolution. She is pursuing her minor project in the Musser lab, investigating the tempo and mode of sponge plasticity under different environmental conditions.

Jackson Roberts
Postgraduate Researcher
Jackson received his B.S. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Yale University and conducted undergraduate research on the C. elegans germline. He joined the Musser lab as a postgraduate researcher to explore the dynamic structure of sponge canals and the evolution of immune systems.
Alumni

Mah Noor
Undergraduate Researcher '25

Anna de Hostos Barth
Undergraduate Researcher '24

Haley Sabol
Undergraduate Researcher '24
Friends

Arun Chavan, PhD
Postdoc in the Medzhitov Lab at Yale University

Fabian Ruperti, PhD
Postdoc at EMBL

Jasmine Mah, PhD
Postdoc in the Juliano Lab at UC Davis

Niko Papadopoulos, PhD
Senior Scientist at the University of Vienna