Since 2016 she has been a full professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.
[a][1] In 2013 she received a research grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study how and where new genes arise.
[4] She runs a theoretical group in the University of Arizona's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department where she investigates aspects of evolvability.
[5] Masel argues that the conventional account of the origin of new genes, namely that they are commonly duplicated from old genes and then evolve to diverge from them, is a chicken and egg explanation, since a functional gene would have to exist before a new function could evolve.
She suggests instead that new genes are born continually from non-coding DNA, a form of preadaptation.