Jacob Michaelson, PhD

Director: Developmental Genomics/Epigenetics Core;
Roy J. Carver Associate Professor Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering, Communication Sciences and Disorders;
Division Director, Computational and Molecular Psychiatry.
Biography

Dr. Jake Michaelson is a Roy J. Carver associate professor in psychiatry and neuroscience and the division director of computational and molecular psychiatry at the University of Iowa. His lab studies the effect of genetic variations on the development of the brain, with specific applications in autism and language impairment. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in biological engineering at Utah State University before earning his PhD in computational biology at the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany in 2010. After his time in Germany, he joined the lab of psychiatric geneticist Jonathan Sebat at UC San Diego, where he completed his postdoctoral training and published several of the earliest papers dealing with whole genome sequencing in autism. In 2013 he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, and his current research is supported by NIMH, the NIDCD, the Simons Foundation, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

Research areas
  • Genetics and comorbidities of autism
  • Genetics of language impairment
  • Predictions of top autism gene candidates
  • Genetics of twice-exceptionality
Photo of Jacob Michaelson
MS in Biological Engineering, Utah State University
PhD in Computational Biology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany