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. Bluesky CV

Jorge García Calleja (EMail: jorge.garcia ‘at‘ ebc.uu.se) is a postdoc in the group who joined us after a PhD at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is now using ancient genomic data and climate reconstructions to study adaptation in humans and sheep.

Rajiv Boscolo Agostini (EMail: rajiv.boscolo-agostini ‘at‘ ebc.uu.se) is doing a joint postdoc with us and the group of Helena Malmström, UU. He is now studying population history and social structure in prehistoric northern Europeans after completing his PhD at the University of Ferrara.

Mustafa Özkan is currently visiting the lab with a postdoctoral grant from TÜBİTAK. He is studying the population history of Anatolian mouflon and will assemble their genome from long read sequencing data.

General information on joining the lab

Alumni

Germán Hernández Alonso was a postdoctoral fellow in our group. He was now working with ancient DNA data from sheep, studying introgression and selection over time. After moving on to another postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, he still continues to collaborate with us on sheep evolution in Asia.

Marianne Dehasque was a postdoctoral fellow in our lab. She analyzed modern and ancient DNA from woolly and non-wooly sheep, herded, feral, and wild, from the Mediterranean area. Now she is a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz and continues to collaborate with us on pangenome approaches.

Mirko Manca is a MSc student at the University of Sassari, Italy who visited on an Erasmus scholarship during 2025. Mirko anaylzed WGS data from Gyps fulvus (Eurasian griffon vulture) to study their population structure and diversity around the Mediterranean sea.

Pedro Morell Miranda was a PhD student in the lab who moved on to a postdoc at LMU Munich after graduation. Pedro has a broad interest in evolutionary and population genetics of animals as well as computational biology. He was using genomic modern and ancient DNA to study the population history of sheep in Europe.

Viviana Floridia is a PhD student at the University of Messina, Italy, who was visiting us during 2023/24. Her background is mostly on the analysis of microbial species in metagenomic data. In Uppsala, she was contributing to our projects studying modern sheep genomes (and a bit of horses).

Joana Baldi David e Silva is an Evolutionary Bioilogy MSc student from the MEME program. During spring 2024 she joined the lab for a small research training looking into phenotypically relevant SNPs in sheep.

Luciana Simões  was a co-supervised PhD student from the Jakobsson Lab at Uppsala University. Since graduating in spring 2023, she continuing as a postdoc in Mattias’ lab. She is using ancient DNA to investigate the demographic history of populations, with a focus on the Neolithic transition.

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

Li Pan was a Master student from Uppsala University. During her time in the group, she has analyzed ancient DNA from different animals.

Erkin Alacamli was a Bioinformatics master student from Uppsala University. He worked on methods for studying genetic relatedness in prehistoric populations.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.