Svante Pääbo, PhD, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Professor of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Leipzig, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Adjunct Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, will give the fifth annual Coleman R. Seskind, MD, Lecture. His presentation, titled “Archaic Genomics,” will take place on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, at 4:00 pm in the Biological Sciences Learning Center, Room 109.
Dr. Pääbo was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He earned his PhD from Uppsala University, Sweden, in 1986 and did postdoctoral research at the Institute for Molecular Biology II, University of Zürich, Switzerland, and the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Pääbo has developed techniques to study DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains. His research group has determined genome sequences from Neanderthals and discovered Denisovans, a previously unknown hominin group in Asia. They have shown that both Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed DNA to present-day humans and that these contributions have physiological and medical consequences today.
Dr. Pääbo received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for these discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins. He has also been honored with the Gruber Foundation Genetics Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, the Japan Prize, and dozens of other awards. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work continues to reshape our understanding of what makes us uniquely human and how the legacy of our extinct relatives lives on within our DNA.
The Coleman R. Seskind, MD, Lecture is an annual lectureship in the Biological Sciences Division. The award features a visiting lecturer working in any field represented in the BSD who is a Nobel Laureate, Lasker Award winner, or other prominent scientist, and who will engage with faculty and students. The lectureship was established in 2021 by a generous gift from Coleman R. Seskind, MD, a retired private-practice physician and alumnus of the College and the Pritzker School of Medicine who previously worked in the Department of Pathology at the University of Chicago.