Jazlyn Mooney grew up in Albuquerque New Mexico. She went to high school and college there too (Eldorado High School and University of New Mexico).
Sketching science created a lasting interest
“I became interested in science in middle school. I had a science teacher, Mr. Pecknik, who made us draw everything we learned about (from central dogma to phylogenies) for class. So we kept a sketch book for our science class and I thought it was super cool.”
Not “cut out for MD/PhD” ?
Becoming a researcher didn’t always seem possible for Jazlyn. One summer, when she was an undergrad, she participated in an MD/PhD prep program. At the end of the summer, her summer advisor told her that she wasn’t cut out to be MD or PhD! Fortunately, she didn’t listen to him but instead listened to her other undergrad advisor, her family and herself and decided to continue her path to become a scientist! She did research as an undergraduate and then applied to PhD programs.
The history of Latin American populations
Jazlyn is now a PhD student at UCLA in the lab of Dr. Kirk Lohmueller and works to better understand the history of human populations using genetic data. She recently published a paper entitled: “Understanding the Hidden Complexity of Latin American Population Isolates.” In this paper she showed how Costa Rican and Colombian people are descended mostly from European males and Amerindian females, and a small number of African individuals.
The field that uses genetic data to understand the history of populations is called “population genetics”. Jazlyn got interested in population genetics when she was an undergrad and got an opportunity to do research with Dr Jeff Long.
Learning new things and presenting at meetings
Jazlyn loves learning new things and her favorite part of being a researcher is that it allows her to learn new things and create new knowledge. Jazlyn has presented her work at many conferences including : University of Chicago Research Forum, the meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics, the Bay Area Population Genomics meeting at UC Santa Cruz in 2018.
Links
Link to paper about the history of people in Costa Rica and Colombia
Link to a free “preprint” version of the same paper
Tacos, R and Twitter
Jazlyn’s favorite coding language: R
Jazlyn’s favorite food: Tacos
Jazlyn’s Twitter handle: @Jazlyn_Mooney
Being A Better Scientist 
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