Jessica A Maisano

Jessica A Maisano is a Researcher at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences within the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin, where she has served since January 2000 after earning her Ph.D. in vertebrate paleontology from Yale University. She is based at the High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility (UTCT) and oversees major digital morphology initiatives.

Her educational background includes doctoral training in vertebrate paleontology at Yale University, establishing her foundation in morphological analysis of fossil and extant organisms.

Dr. Maisano's research integrates vertebrate paleontology, herpetology, and advanced imaging techniques, with primary focus on high-resolution x-ray computed tomography applications. She leads Digital Morphology (DigiMorph.org), an NSF Digital Library providing open-access CT imagery of nearly 700 specimens spanning diverse taxa, and collaborates on Deep Scaly—a project under NSF's Assembling the Tree of Life initiative investigating squamate (lizards, snakes, amphisbaenians) evolutionary relationships. Her work bridges developmental biology with digital morphology to advance understanding of anatomical structures across evolutionary timescales.

She maintains active professional engagement through memberships in the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, Herpetologists League, Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, and Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Her research program emphasizes collaborative infrastructure development, particularly through UTCT where she implements cutting-edge scanning protocols and digital archiving systems that support global morphological research communities. Current efforts focus on expanding DigiMorph's specimen database and refining phylogenetic analyses for squamate systematics via Deep Scaly.