Portrait of Svante Pääbo

Science Breakthrough

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Svante Pääbo

  • 2014
  • Speaker
  • Life Sciences

Svante Pääbo (born 20 April 1955) is a Swedish biologist specializing in evolutionary genetics. He was born in 1955 in Stockholm, father Sune Bergström (the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982) and mother Estonian Karin Pääbo, earned his PhD from Uppsala University in 1986. Since 1997, he has been director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Svante Pääbo is an honorary doctor at several universities, a member of eight scientific academies including the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy Leopoldina and the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. He has received numerous scientific prizes and awards and has given more than 400 scientific and popular talks on his work. Svante Pääbo was awarded with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.