Svante Pääbo

Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist and a founder of paleogenetics, the study of ancient DNA to investigate evolution. As director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, he led research that helped sequence the Neanderthal genome and identify the Denisovan hominin. He received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning extinct hominin genomes and human evolution.