PEOPLE
SENIOR RESEARCHERS
Margit Berner | Department for Anthropology, Natural History Museum, Vienna
Margit Berner is a human biologist and anthropologist, who works at the Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria and also teaches at the University of Vienna. As a curator at the Museum’s Anthropology Department, she researches and publishes widely on questions of physical anthropology, osteology and paleopathology as well as the history of anthropology and collections, including from the Nazi period.
In the HistoGenes project Margit Berner is leading, coordinating and supervising the anthropology project team of the Natural History Museum Vienna.
Zsolt Bernert | Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest
Corina Knipper | Curt Engelhorn Zentrum Archäometrie, Mannheim
Harald Meller | Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie/ Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle/Saale
Balázs Mende | Laboratory of Archaeogenetics, Budapest
Anna Szécsényi-Nagy | Laboratory of Archaeogenetics, Eötvös Loránd Research Network, Budapest
I studied between 2002-2009 biology (genetics) and archaeology (with specialization in prehistory and migration period) at the ELTE University Budapest. I become and archaeogeneticist in Mainz (Germany) where at the Johannes Gutenberg University I worked on my PhD topic of "Population history of the Neolithic Carpathian Basin" between 2010-2013, graduated in 2015.
Since 2014 I have been working as a research fellow in the Laboratory of Archaeogenetics of the Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre of the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that has been reorganized in 2019 under the Eötvös Loránd Research Network.
As a head of the ancient DNA laboratory, my task is to help the project through coordinating collaborations, project planning, supervising biology students and laboratory work and helping the interdisciplinary evaluation of the results.
Krishna Veeramah | Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, New York
I received both my B.Sc. in 2003, and Ph.D. in 2008 from University College London. His Ph.D., conducted under the supervision of Mark Thomas, examining the distribution of genetic variation in Africans. I then moved to UCLA as part of John Novembre’s lab where I looked at the genetic architecture of European population isolates. In 2010 I joined Michael Hammer’s lab at the University of Arizona in order to lead a project comparing patterns of genomic variation on the autosomes and X chromosome in apes. I joined the faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook in January 2014 as part of the new initiative in human evolutionary biology where I now run the Veeramah Lab.
The primary focus of the Veeramah Lab is Evolutionary Genomics and Paleogenomics. We work on various species, ranging from humans and other non-human primates, through to Three-spined stickleback. We are particularly interested in analyzing genomic data from multiple time points to study evolution. I have a long-standing interest in using paleogenomic data to better understand post-Roman early Medieval Europe, spurred by organizing the DNA and History seminar series while a Postdoc at UCLA under the supervision of Patrick Geary.