After receiving his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Florida, his first postdoc was at the University of California Riverside as an NSF Plant Genome fellow. Jacob moved to Cornell in 2018 and has been working on a number of genomics projects with a common theme of biodiversity genomics or evolutionary genomics with expertise in genome assembly, phylogenomics, and population genomics. Jacob is also a Research Associate in the School of Integrative Plant Science Section Plant Biology working on the angiosperm genera Calochortus, Glycine, and Tigridia to name a few.