Stephan Schiffels

Group leader
Department of Archaeogenetics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
phone: +49 (0) 341 3550 550
e-mail:
stephan_schiffels@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de
Projects / Group
- I am group leader of the Population Genetics group at the Department for Archaeogenetics. My group at the MPI investigates human history by means of Genetics, and develops computational methods to model and analyse ancient and modern genomic data.
- I am Principal investigator of the ERC-funded project MICROSCOPE, and co-lead the Poseidon project.
Curriculum Vitae
I have studied Physics at the University of Cologne, Germany, and finished my PhD in January 2012. In my thesis I studied asexual adaptation and the effect of genetic linkage on natural selection. From 2012 until 2015 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Richard Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinton, Cambridge, UK. I have mainly worked on methods to estimate past demography from genome sequences, and on ancient DNA from archaeological sites in East England, dating to the Iron Age and early Anglo-Saxon era. Since September 2015 I am research group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
In 2019 I was awarded an ERC Starting grant to develop new population genetic methods based on rare genetic variation, and to study the European Iron Age (Project MICROSCOPE)
Since 2020 I have transferred my group, together with the Department of Archaeogenetics, to the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig. Since October 2021 I am a W2 Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI-EVA.
Videos
Publications
2015
Malinsky, M., Challis, R.J., Tyers, A. M., Schiffels, S., Terai, Y., Ngatunga, B. P., Miska, E. A., Durbin, R., Genner, M. J. & Turner, G.F. (2015). “Genomic Islands of Speciation Separate Cichlid Ecomorphs in an East African Crater Lake.” Science 350 (6267): 1493–98.
DOI
Pagani, L., Schiffels, S., Gurdasani, D., Danecek, P., Scally, A., Chen, Y. , Xue, Y. , et al. (2015). “Tracing the Route of Modern Humans out of Africa by Using 225 Human Genome Sequences from Ethiopians and Egyptians.” American Journal of Human Genetics 96 (6): 986–91.
DOI
UK10K Consortium, Walter, K., Min, J. L., Huang, J., Crooks, L., Memari, Y., McCarthy, S., et al. (2015). “The UK10K Project Identifies Rare Variants in Health and Disease.” Nature 526 (7571): 82–90.
DOI
2014
Schiffels, S. & Durbin, R. (2014). Inferring human population size and separation history from multiple genome sequences. Nature Genetics
DOI
2011
Schiffels, S., Szöllösi, G., Mustonen, V. & Lässig, M. (2011). Emergent Neutrality in Adaptive Asexual Evolution. Genetics
DOI
Illingworth, C. J. R., Parts, L., Schiffels, S., Liti, G. & Mustonen, V. (2011). “Quantifying Selection Acting on a Complex Trait Using Allele Frequency Time-Series Data.” Molecular Biology and Evolution, November.
DOI