Greger Larson

In a room full of archaeologists I’m a geneticist, and in a room of geneticists I’m an archaeologist.

I received my bachelor’s degree in 1996 from Claremont McKenna College, a small liberal arts college in California. I then read just about everything Stephen J Gould ever wrote over the following three years while wandering the deserts of Turkmenistan and working for an environmental consultancy in Azerbaijan. Deciding that evolution was cooler than oil, I studied at Oxford and the University of Colorado before receiving a PhD in Zoology in 2006. I then spent two years in Uppsala, Sweden on an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship before starting a job in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University. I moved to the University of Oxford in 2015 to become the Director of the Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network where I continue to focus on the use of ancient DNA to study the pattern and process of domestication. I rarely wonder what my salary would be had I stuck to oil.