Svante Pääbo

Svante Pääbo
Svante Pääbo at the Royal Society admissions day in July 2016
Born	(1955-04-20) 20 April 1955 (age 62)
Nationality	Sweden
Fields	Genetics Evolutionary Anthropology
Institutions	Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Alma mater	Uppsala University
Thesis	How the E19 protein of adenoviruses modulates the immune system (1986)
Known for	Paleogenetics
Notable awards	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (1992) Pour le Mérite (2008) Kistler Prize (2009) Great Cross of Merit with star (2009) Gruber Prize in Genetics (2013) ForMemRS (2016) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016) Keio Medical Science Prize (2016)
Website www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/staff/paabo/home.html

Svante Pääbo ([ˈsvanteː ˈpɛːbøː]; born 20 April 1955) is a Swedish biologist specializing in evolutionary genetics. One of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. Since 1997, he has been director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Pääbo was born in and grew up with his mother, Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo. He barely knew his father, biochemist Sune Bergström, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982. He earned his PhD from Uppsala University in 1986 for research investigating how the E19 protein of adenoviruses modulates the immune system.

Pääbo is known as one of the founders of paleogenetics, a discipline that uses the methods of genetics to study early humans and other ancient populations. In 1997, Pääbo and colleagues reported their successful sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), originating from a specimen found in Feldhofer grotto in the Neander valley.

In August 2002, Pääbo's department published findings about the "language gene", FOXP2, which is lacking or damaged in some individuals with language disabilities.