Johannes Krause

Johannes Krause earned his Ph.D. in Genetics at Leipzig University in the lab of Nobel laurate Svante Pääbo. He was appointed junior professor at the University of Tübingen in 2010, and subsequently full professor for Archaeo- and Paleogenetics in 2013. In 2014, he became founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, heading the Department of Archaeogenetics. He is one of the founding directors of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM), established in 2016. In 2020 he was reappointed to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He focuses on the analysis of ancient DNA to investigate such topics as pathogens from historic and prehistoric epidemics, human genetic history and human evolution. He contributed substantially to deciphering the Neanderthal genome and the shared genetic heritage of Neanderthals and modern humans. In 2010, he discovered the first genetic evidence of the Denisovans, an extinct hominin discovered in Siberia. His recent work includes revealing the genetic heritage of ancient Egyptians, reconstructing the first Pleistocene African genomes, uncovering the source of the epidemic plague bacteria that periodically caused historic and prehistoric epidemics in Europe, or clarifying the complex history of Europe’s prehistoric mass migrations. Prof. Dr. Krause has more than 250 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics, PNAS, Nature Genetics, etc. He also authored two international bestsellers translated in more than 25 languages.