Alan Cooper

Biography

Prof. Alan Cooper has played a central role in the development of the field of ancient DNA, starting with his PhD research in Allan Wilson’s UC Berkeley laboratory with Svante Paabo in 1989. He created the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at the University of Oxford, and was Professor of Ancient Biomolecules from 2001-2005. He then established the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide as an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow (2005-2010), and has since been an ARC Future Fellow (2011-2014) and is now an ARC Laureate Fellow (2015-2019). In 2016 he was named the South Australian Scientist of the Year. He currently leads the Aboriginal Heritage Project in collaboration with the South Australian Museum and Aboriginal Families and Communities around Australia, which aims to create the first map of Aboriginal Australia, allowing people of Aboriginal descent to trace their heritage back beyond recent records. Prof. Cooper’s research interests include the use of ancient genetic data and analytical approaches to study key evolutionary processes – including genomic responses to past climate and environmental changes, extinction events, human evolution and migration, molecular evolution, microbiomes and disease – across a broad range of time and space. His multi-disciplinary focus integrates data from genomics, bioinformatics, zoology, archaeology, microbiology, forensics, palaeontology, physical dating methods, and climate records and he has led many large international multi-author studies which have resulted in major advances and high profile publications (27 in Science and Nature). He has published over 230 peer reviewed papers which have been cited over 17,000 times. His h-index is 55 (Web of Science) or 69 (Google Scholar).

Research Interest

Medicine,Medical Education,Research,etc