Biography

My career has been built around my love of fieldwork, often involving caving in weird and wonderful parts of the world – where I collect ancient and modern samples of animals and plants, sediments, water and other materials. I specialize in developing new ways to extract detailed genetic signals from them, to study past environments and the impacts of climate and human caused changes. I started my ancient research in Allan Wilson’s Lab at UC Berkeley with Svante Pääbo in 1989, performing some of the first ancient DNA studies and building the field standards for ancient DNA. My main interest has always been research that spans multiple disciplines and focuses on unconventional approaches to answer big picture questions. I have a broad background that ranges across climate change, environmental science, genomics, and evolution, with many detours. My standard approach is to build international teams of multi-disciplinary experts interested in tackling major scientific questions. Recent examples include the history of humans as we left Africa and dispersed around the world, the role of geomagnetism and solar weather in climate and evolution, and microbiology and human dental health and medicine.