Manfred Kayser

After gaining his PhD in Genetics from the Humboldt-University Berlin in 1998, Dr Kayser went on to do postdoctoral work in the field of Anthropological Genetics at Pennsylvania State University and became a Research Scientist at Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig. In 2004 he received his Habilitation in Genetics from the University of Leipzig and the prestigious Heisenberg Fellowship of the German Research Council (DFG), before being appointed as Full Professor and Head of the Department of Forensic Molecular Biology at the Erasmus University Medical Centre Rotterdam.

Current research areas include human evolutionary and population genetics, human population history, the genetics of human appearance, forensic genetics and forensic molecular biology. He has published close to 100 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, co-authored books on genetic variation, molecular forensics, and molecular diagnostics, and personally provided over 90 mostly invited talks to scientific conferences and institutions.