Expert
Joanna Masel is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. She is interested in lots of different stuff, her research projects involve mathematics, simulations, downloading and analyzing pre-existing data, or all of the above. She works on systems where theoretical models can give insights that just wouldn’t be available any other way, and then to link these models to data. Most of the work in her group is connected in some way to evolvability. she is most interested in models that explicitly capture mechanistic constraints, whether from biochemistry, genetics, cellular biology, physiology, or ecology, and work out their evolutionary consequences. Specific interests at the moment include the robustness and evolvability of biological systems, the origins of coding sequences from non-coding ancestors, and the tension between relative and absolute competitions in evolution, ecology, and economics.