Jaron is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCSC. His PhD was in organic chemistry with Prof. Noah Burns at Stanford University, where he synthesized the polycyclobutane-containing ladderane lipids. Jaron was an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellow with Prof. David Liu at the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT working at the intersection of continuous directed evolution and chemical biology to evolve protein tags that respond to small-molecule ligands. The Mercer Lab officially opened its doors at UCSC September 2024! ​