Svante Pääbo

Svante Erik Pääbo, is a Swedish geneticist specializing in the field of evolutionary genetics. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. He is the founding director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, since 1997. He is also a 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. Svante Pääbo grew up in the Stockholm suburb Bagarmossen with his mother, the Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo. His father, who was married with a family, came visiting on Saturdays, was the biochemist Sune Bergström, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982. In 2008 Svante Pääbo married the American primatologist and geneticist Linda Vigilant. Together they have two children.