B.S. Stanford University

I completed my undergraduate degree in Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology from Stanford, with a minor in Education. My undergraduate research focused on the mechanisms underlying the transcriptional activation of the zygotic genome in early Xenopus development. As a Systems, Synthetic and Quantitative Biology PhD student, I now find myself increasingly fascinated by evolutionary biology and am looking for ways to bridge my interests in molecular and evolutionary mechanisms. I am supported by a Graduate Research Training Fellowship (GRFP) funded by the National Science Foundation.

There and back again: the dynamic evolution of panarthropod germ cell specification mechanisms. Jonchee A. Kao, Emily L. Rivard, Rishabh R. Kapoor and Cassandra G. Extavour bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.05.668520 (2025).

Related Media:

• Specifying primordial germ cells, a tale of transitions

[PubMed]

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Evolutionary innovation through fusion of sequences from across the tree of life. Rishabh R. Kapoor, Evelyn E. Schwager, Supanat Phuangphong, Emily L. Rivard, Chandrashekar Kuyyamudi, Suhrid Ghosh, Isobel Ronai and Cassandra G. Extavour bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.30.672725 (2025). [PubMed]

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The DNA-to-cytoplasm ratio broadly activates zygotic gene expression in Xenopus. D. Jukam, R.R. Kapoor, A. F. Straight, J.M. Skotheim. Current Biology 31(19):4269-4281 (2021)