People

Torsten Günther (EMail: torsten.gunther ‘at‘ ebc.uu.se) started the lab in 2018. He did his PhD on population genomics of Arabidopsis thaliana and then came to Uppsala University as a Postdoc in September 2013. Torsten is studying ancient DNA data in order to understand more about human migrations and adaptation in prehistoric Europe, but he also continues to be interested in population genetics of non-human species including domesticated animals. Twitter CV

Pedro Morell Miranda (EMail: pedro.morell ‘at‘ ebc.uu.se) is a PhD student in the lab. Pedro has a broad interest in evolutionary and population genetics of animals as well as computational biology. He is using genomic ancient DNA to study the population history of domesticated animals. Twitter

Luciana Simões (EMail: luciana.simoes ‘at‘ ebc.uu.se) was a co-supervised PhD student from the Jakobsson Lab at Uppsala University. Since graduating in spring 2023, she is wrapping up her PhD projects as a postdoc. Luciana is fascinated by the possibility of unraveling human evolution by disentangling patterns of genetic variation through time. She is using ancient DNA to investigate the demographic history of populations, with a focus on the Neolithic transition. Furthermore, she is interested in the development of Next Generation Sequencing techniques in order to improve the quality of genomic sequences and aDNA research. Twitter

Myriam Croze is doing a joint postdoc between Uppsala and the Institute for Mummy Studies at EURAC in Bolzano, Italy. She is studying prehistoric alpine populations including some contemporaries of the Tyrolean Iceman, Ötzi.

Li Pan is a Master student from Uppsala University. She currently conducting her master thesis analyzing ancient DNA from different animals.

Erkin Alacamli is a Bioinformatics master student from Uppsala University. He is studying genetic relatedness in prehistoric populations.

General information on joining the lab

Alumni

Rickard Hammarén was a PhD student from the lab of Carina Schlebusch who graduated in fall 2022. His focus was on the population history of several African populations using both modern and ancient DNA. Torsten was one of his co-supervisors. Twitter

Martin Larsson was a Master student from Uppsala University. He analyzed ancient DNA data from Scandinavian sheep. In his free time, he is also a rock star.

Jacob Chisausky was a master student from the MEME program who conducted a remote research project surveying methods for investigating gene flow from wild relatives without knowing the full extent of the past diversity of the source populations.

André Elias Rodrigues Soares (EMail: andre.soares ‘ at‘ ebc.uu.se) was a postdoctoral fellow in our lab. André has broad experiences in palaeogenomics, phylogenetics and population genetics and he is interested in all kinds of animals. In our group he was using ancient DNA to study the eastern expansion of domesticated sheep. Nowadays, he is working as a bioinformatician for the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden. Twitter

Frederic Zimmer was a master student from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He did an internship with us where he jointly analysed ancient genomic and environmental data. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this internship took place remotely but we would have liked to welcome him in Uppsala. He is now doing an evo-devo PhD in Mainz.

Arev Pelin Sümer was a master student from the MEME program. She was visiting the lab in 2019 and looked into GC-biased gene conversion. Arev continued the project in 2020 working remotely from Germany and Turkey due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, she is a PhD student with Ben Peter at the Max-Planck-Institute in Leipzig. Twitter

Mirela Balan was a bioinformatics master student undergoing research training in the group. She was contributing to different projects while improving her coding skills. Twitter

Darshan Chetty was a Master student from Uppsala University. He has been analyzing ancient DNA from Mesolithic Europe and was supervised by Luciana and Torsten.

Megha Srigyan was a master student in the MEME program. She performed a research project with historical ancient DNA data from the Middle East. Twitter

Hannes Yngve was a Master student from Gothenburg University. Hannes was part of the Master program in Bioinformatics and Systems biology. He performed his Master thesis project in the group, working on a project analyzing genomic data from human populations who lived in middle and late Neolithic Scandinavia.

Lina Löfstrand is a high school student from Gävle. In 2018, she was conducting a research project (Gymnasiearbete) studying the genetic basis of whether you are a morning or evening person.

Emilie Laurent was a Bachelor student from Uppsala University who did her degree project with us in 2018. She was investigating the length of telomere sequences in next-generation sequencing data from human remains. Emilie is now doing her Master in Bioinformatics at Uppsala University.

Jose Manuel Monroy Kuhn was a Master student from the MEME program who did a research project with us in 2015. He developed a method to estimate kin-relationships from aDNA data which was published as READ (Relationship Estimation from Ancient DNA). Manuel went on to do a PhD at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

Anders Sjölander was a Master student from Uppsala University who did his thesis with us in 2015/2016. He tested ways to estimate linkage disequilibrium (LD) from aDNA data and to date admixture events. His work became part of a large study on the recolonization of Scandinavia after the last glacial maximum. He is now working for UPPMAX.