Rebecca L. Cann

Rebecca L. Cann
Born	1951 Burlington, Iowa
Residence	Honolulu, Hawaii
Nationality	American
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Known for	Out of Africa theory
Scientific career
Fields	Anthropology, genetics, ornithology
Institutions	University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Doctoral advisor	Allan Wilson

Rebecca L. Cann (born 1951) is a geneticist who made a scientific breakthrough on variation and evolution in humans, popularly called . Her discovery that all living humans are genetically descended from a single African mother who lived <200,000 years ago became the foundation of the Out of Africa theory, the most widely accepted explanation of the origin of all modern humans. She is currently Professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Rebecca Cann was born in 1951 and spent her childhood at Des Moines, Iowa, where she completed her elementary schooling. In a summer, just before she started high school, her family moved to San Francisco, California. In 1967 she entered an all-girl Catholic High School in California. She earned a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree with a major in genetics at University of California, Berkeley in 1972. She then worked at Cutter Laboratories at Berkeley for five years (1972-1977) after finishing college, where she worked on macaque serum proteins and learned the techniques for constructing phylogenetic tree, which would be pivotal for her later achievements. She continued at UC Berkeley for her doctorate in genetics under the supervision of Allan Wilson of the Department of Biochemistry, and graduated in 1982. She got a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics, University of Hawaii at Honolulu in 1986.

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