Principal Investigator,  RIKEN

Research Area: Evolutionary Biology, Population Genomics, Ancient DNA, Ancestral Recombination Graphs, Statistics, Applied Mathematics

Award Citation: The AYSF Committee celebrates Dr. Leo Speidel's pioneering work in developing computational tools for genealogy reconstruction and ancestry modelling. AYSF would like to support his future work which aims to reconstruct genome-wide genealogies among individuals and species, enabling higher-resolution analysis of complex evolutionary histories.

Bio: Leo Speidel is a group leader of the Mathematical Genomics Research Unit at RIKEN, Japan’s national scientific research institute. His work aims to reconstruct human history and evolution from large-scale genomic datasets of present-day and ancient people. His research reveals, at increasingly high resolution, how humans migrated, mixed, and evolved, as well as how interactions among evolutionary processes have shaped genetic variation over time. His group develops the statistical methods that enable such inferences, including methods for reconstructing genome-wide genealogies that trace individual genomes through their shared ancestors back in time. Before joining RIKEN in 2024, he was a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at UCL and the Francis Crick Institute in London. He completed a BSc in Mathematics at LMU Munich, an MSc in Mathematical Informatics at the University of Tokyo, and a PhD in Statistics at the University of Oxford.

Personal Web:https://speidellab.github.io/