I’m an evolutionary biologist. I’m currently a Lewis-Sigler Scholar (an independent postdoc) at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Center for Integrative Genomics.
I have a BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Philosophy from Harvard College, and a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University. My dissertation work focused on computational challenges in identifying evolutionarily novel genes.
I currently study “tinkering loci,” which are hotspots in the genome of the fly Drosophila affinis that appear to perform very high rates of “exon shuffling,” a process which reassorts fragments of existing genes to make new ones. I believe that tinkering loci may be a general phenomenon important in accelerating animal evolution by facilitating the reassortment of modular sequences.
I’m an editor at the Journal of Molecular Evolution and Biocosmos.
You can contact me at cara.weisman@gmail.com.
Google scholar (publication list): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=crObMO4AAAAJ&hl=en
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/caraweisman.bsky.social
Twitter: https://x.com/WeismanCara
Cara Weisman 