Dr Peter Forster

Peter Forster's research concerns the molecular population genetics of humans. Born in 1967, he studied chemistry at the universities of Kiel and Hamburg, specialised in genetics at the Heinrich-Pette-Institute of Virology and Immunology in Hamburg and received his PhD in Biology in 1997. After postdoctoral research at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Muenster until 1999, he was appointed Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge until 2006. In the same period, he became a Founding Member of the interdisciplinary Junge Akademie in Berlin. From 2006-2009 he was a university senior lecturer in forensics and life sciences. Peter Forster is currently Director of Research at the Institute for Forensic Genetics in Muenster (Germany), Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, and an editor of the International Journal of Legal Medicine (Springer, Heidelberg).

Peter Forster has co-developed (with H.-J. Bandelt, A. Röhl, and T. Polzin) phylogenetic network analysis of mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosomal DNA, and linguistic data. He also specialises in DNA ancestry tests. In 2011, the Cambridge Philosophical Society awarded Dr. Peter Forster the William Bate Hardy Prize for his work on human origins, in 2012 Germany's National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) elected him a life member, and in 2016 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

Contact email: [email protected]