About Dr. Eske Willerslev
Dr. Eske Willerslev
Evolutionary Geneticist
University of Copenhagen
University of Cambridge
TAC Festival 2025 Keynote Address:
“Hunt for the Molecular Past”
Professor Eske Willerslev is a visionary evolutionary geneticist who has established new fields of research and fundamentally transformed our understanding of human evolution, human pathogen evolution, and environmental changes. The impact of his research has transcended his primary field to influence such fields as medicine, ecology and archaeology and the environmental and climate sciences. Dr. Willerslev holds a professorship at the University of Copenhagen, where he is the Director of the Centre for Ancient Environmental Genomics (CAEG), as well as at the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge. He oversees several independent research groups at the intersection of genetics, medicine, geology, and archaeology.
Willerslev is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences (US) and holds the Order of the Dannebrog issued by her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 2017. During his doctoral research, Eske Willerslev established the field of environmental DNA. Later his group sequenced the first ancient human genome. Willerslev’s research in the last decade has focused on macroregional history, population genomics, pathogen evolution, and paleoecological reconstructions. His achievements in this field have helped to understand ancient migration patterns, the spread of specific human traits across the world, pathogen spread and evolution, and ecosystem responses to climatic changes in space and time. This work has led to the rewriting of human history across Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, and has changed how we track human genetic adaptations.
Eske Willerslev has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles. He is among the Web of Science’s most Highly Cited researchers, that is, within the top 1% in his fields. His work was featured on February 21, 2024, in a PBS NOVA episode titled “Hunt for the Oldest DNA.”