Rate My Professor Yannick Jacob

Yannick Jacob is a tenured Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, where he serves as Track Director for Plant Molecular Biology. Born in Quebec, Canada, he obtained his B.Sc. in 2001 and M.Sc. in 2003 in Biochemistry from Université de Montréal. His M.Sc. research with B. Franz Lang focused on the evolution of tmRNAs and their roles in regulating protein translation in bacteria. Jacob earned his Ph.D. in Plant Genetics in 2008 from Indiana University Bloomington in the laboratory of Scott D. Michaels, studying the molecular genetics of flowering time in Arabidopsis and epigenetic regulation of DNA replication. His doctoral work led to the discovery of novel chromatin-modifying proteins regulating DNA replication in plants. After his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University Biology Department from 2009 to 2010 and then at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 2010 to 2015 in Rob Martienssen's lab. There, as an HHMI Research Associate and recipient of fellowships from Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRQS), he discovered that single amino acid differences between histone variants regulate chromatin-modifying proteins, unveiling a new layer of epigenetic regulation conserved in all eukaryotes.