Writing

Petar Pajic, currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, has published a new review article in Genome Biology and Evolution exploring how VNTRs drive evolutionary innovation in mammals while carrying functional risk.

I've been awarded a prestigious Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB) from the National Science Foundation, joining Dr. Stacy Malaker's lab at Yale University to study glycoproteomics and the evolutionary genetics of mucins.

My latest paper on the evolutionary history of the AMY1 gene has garnered significant attention from CNN, The New York Times, and scientists in the field, shedding light on how our ancestors adapted to carbohydrate-rich diets long before the advent of agriculture.

When I first entered Dr. Gokcumen's lab, I carried with me a heavy bag of naivety about the value of basic science. One story about the Manhattan Project reshaped my perspective on applied versus basic research entirely.

I led this project with the Stefan Ruhl Laboratory on how mucin proteins have evolved. Our work shows that the gain of exonic repeats on existing precursor genes led to the de novo evolution of mucin function in multiple mammalian lineages.