Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo delivered academic lecture at the ceremony of the 106th anniversary of Estonia’s national university

The University of Tartu conferred the title of Honorary Doctor upon Svante Pääbo, Professor of the University of Leipzig and a Nobel laureate, for his remarkable achievements in the study of human evolution, for inspiring and training University of Tartu researchers and integrating them into the international interdisciplinary community of researchers in the biological and cultural evolution of humans.

Svante Pääbo is considered the founder of paleogenetics, the field devoted to the analysis of genetic material recovered from fossil and historical remains. In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2022, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work on the evolution of humans and their sister groups.

Pääbo’s research team was the first to sequence the Neanderthal genome, to determine the proportion of Neanderthal-derived gene variants in modern humans, and to investigate their roles in shaping our species’ diseases and adaptations.

Svante Pääbo is the founder and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany, established in 1997). Under his supervision, several internationally renowned Estonian researchers have launched their scientific careers.

1 December marks 106 years from the opening of the Estonian-language University of Tartu. Traditional anniversary events are held on that occasion. Read more on the university website.