Biography

Martin B. Richards is Professor of Archaeogenetics at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He has published on archaeogenetics widely in the past two decades, with a current Scopus h index of 49. He studied genetics at the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, moving to Oxford University and into archaeogenetic research in 1990. From there, he developed collaborative links with a small group of like-minded colleagues who spearheaded the use of network diagrams in the phylogenetic and phylogeographic analysis of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This enjoyable collaboration was to yield influential models for the settlement of both Europe and the Pacific, and for prehistoric dispersals in Africa. He subsequently moved to UCL, Huddersfield and then Leeds University, where he taught, amongst other topics, human evolution, molecular evolution, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. He published with his colleagues in Science on the Southern Coastal Route out of Africa in 2005, resulting in a bigger office and subsequently a Chair in Archaeogenetics in 2008. In 2012 he returned as a Research Professor to Huddersfield , where he and his colleagues Dr Maria Pala and Dr Ceiridwen Edwards form the nucleus of the Archaeogenetics Research Group, with both a modern molecular laboratory and an ancient DNA facility. His research in the last decade or so has particularly sought to apply whole-mtDNA genome variation to archaeogenetic questions, such as the route taken by modern humans dispersing out of Africa and the settlement of Southeast Asia and the Pacific – more recently returning his focus to the continuing controversy over the settlement of Europe. He co-edited Mitochondrial DNA and the Evolution of Homo Sapiens (Springer-Verlag, 2006) with Hans-Jürgen Bandelt and Vincent Macaulay.