Svante Pääbo
Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist specialising in the field of evolutionary genetics and a Nobel prize laureate. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. He was appointed director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany in 1997. He is also professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. In 2022, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution."