Juston Jaco

Juston Jaco is a Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Sciences program at UC San Diego who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience. His academic career began at the University of Michigan, where he graduated with highest honors in environmental science from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Juston then served three years as an AmeriCorps service member, building gardens in outdoor urban school environments and transforming vacant concrete patches into fully functioning “living lab” classrooms across Northern California. It was during this time that he became passionate about the intersection of environment, nutrition, and health—both human and planetary. Believing in the concept of “food as medicine,” Juston went on to earn a Master of Science in Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine from the University of Western States and a Master of Public Health from Harvard University, specializing in global health, nutrition innovation, and food law and policy. Complementing his scholastic achievements, he gained one-on-one patient experience through a nutrition residency appointment at the Sandy Hook Clinic in Newtown, Connecticut, under the direct supervision of Kara Fitzgerald, one of the nation’s leading naturopathic physicians.

At UC San Diego, Juston is now investigating the impact of chronic red meat consumption in otherwise healthy mice in the labs of Pascal Gagneux and Ajit Varki. By linking modern nutrition and chronic disease back to questions of human evolution, his research seeks to uncover why the human lineage is distinctively vulnerable to certain diet-related diseases.