Jacob is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology, and Genetics program, as well as a Bioinformatics and Computational Biology MS student.  Jacob performs his thesis research in Dr. Xiao Dong's lab, where he studies the role of somatic mutations in human aging.  Jacob is particularly interested in linking conserved patterns of somatic mutation accumulation to discrete health outcomes, with the goal of eventually developing drugs targeting fundamental drivers of genome instability.