Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
Please go to students and applicants to login
Peter Forster's research concerns the molecular population genetics of humans. Born in 1967, he studied chemistry at the universities of Kiel and Hamburg, specialised in genetics at the Heinrich-Pette-Institute of Virology and Immunology in Hamburg and received his PhD in Biology in 1997. After postdoctoral research at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Muenster until 1999, he was appointed Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge until 2006. In the same period, he became a Founding Member of the interdisciplinary Junge Akademie in Berlin. From 2006-2009 he was a university senior lecturer in forensics and life sciences. Peter Forster is currently Director of Research at the Institute for Forensic Genetics in Muenster (Germany), Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, and an editor of the International Journal of Legal Medicine (Springer, Heidelberg).
Peter Forster has co-developed (with H.-J. Bandelt, A. Röhl, and T. Polzin) phylogenetic network analysis of mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosomal DNA, and linguistic data. He also specialises in DNA ancestry tests. In 2011, the Cambridge Philosophical Society awarded Dr. Peter Forster the William Bate Hardy Prize for his work on human origins, in 2012 Germany's National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) elected him a life member, and in 2016 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.
Contact email: pf223@cam.ac.uk
Molecular population genetics of humans. There are five main aspects to my research, which has appeared since 1994 in over 50 peer-reviewed articles and books including Nature, Nature Genetics, Science and PNAS.
Population Genetic Research on Human Prehistory: Application of our phylogenetic algorithms to human mtDNA and Y chromosomal evolution. Genetic dating of ancestral nodes to reconstruct prehistoric ancestral origins, colonisation routes and timescales. Simulation studies on evolutionary scenarios to determine population sizes.
Population Genetic Research on Horse Prehistory: Application of our phylogenetic algorithms to horse mtDNA evolution. Reconstruction of the evolutionary history of equids through DNA; alignment with the human genetic and archaeological timescales.
Medical and Forensic Genetics: Effect of natural radioactivity on human DNA: Detection of new mutations and mutation mechanisms in living pedigrees from coastal south India (natural abundance of thorium oxide). Forensic application of human DNA variation: Development of Y, STR and mtDNA databases for the prediction of geographic origin of DNA stain donors.
Language: Prehistory Reconstruction of proto-languages: Application of phylogenetic network algorithms to reconstruct ancestral vocabulary and other language features on the basis of surviving languages and records. Phylogenetic dating of language splits. Interdisciplinary synthesis of human evolution. Integration of archaeology, palaeoclimatology, genetics and linguistics into a chronological framework of human evolution and dispersal.
Bioinformatics: Development and maintenance of DNA databases and of phylogenetic techniques to reconstruct ancestral types from living variation. Maintenance of our phylogenetic network algorithms (www.fluxus-engineering.com) and geographic information systems (for mtDNA, Y STRs) for academic research.
