Nobel prize-winning geneticist Svante Pääbo gives lecture at University of Tartu
Nobel prize winner Professor Svante Pääbo gave a lecture titled "About Neandertals, and how they live on in many of us" in English on Monday at the University of Tartu after receiving an honorary doctorate.
You can watch the lecture again HERE on the university's web page.
The University of Tartu conferred the title of Honorary Doctor upon Pääbo, Professor of the University of Leipzig and a Nobel laureate, for his remarkable achievements in the study of human evolution, for inspiring and training University of Tartu researchers and integrating them into the international interdisciplinary community of researchers in the biological and cultural evolution of humans.
Pääbo is considered the founder of paleogenetics, the field devoted to the analysis of genetic material recovered from fossil and historical remains.
In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2022, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work on the evolution of humans and their sister groups.
The professor's research team was the first to sequence the Neanderthal genome, to determine the proportion of Neanderthal-derived gene variants in modern humans, and to investigate their roles in shaping our species' diseases and adaptations.
Pääbo is the founder and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany, established in 1997). Under his supervision, several internationally renowned Estonian researchers have launched their scientific careers.
Pääbo is Swedish but also has Estonian heritage.
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Editor: Helen Wright
