BIOTA

Anders Götherström earned his Ph.D. in Archaeology from Stockholm University in 2001, with a dissertation on archaeogenetics conducted within a project funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond that focused on the Vendel and Viking periods in the Mälaren Valley. He subsequently held a postdoctoral position at Centro Mixto, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2001–2002), where his research centered on the domestication of horses and livestock.

For the next decade, he led a research group at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Uppsala University, working primarily on the archaeogenetics of prehistoric humans. The team was especially engaged in understanding the Neolithic transition, the spread of farming and animal husbandry across Europe.

In 2012, Götherström returned to the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies at Stockholm University, where his research moved to latter periods such as the Vendel, Viking, and medieval periods. He is one of the founders of the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Established in 2020, the Centre has become a leading force in ancient DNA research.

Among his key scientific contributions are:

1. being an early adopter of next-generation sequencing technologies in ancient DNA research and adapting laboratory protocols to these methods;
2. helping to demonstrate that the Neolithic transition in Europe was driven by gene flow, through a series of publications that include Malmström et al. (2009), Skoglund et al. (2012, 2014), Omrak et al. (2016), and Kılınç et al. (2016); and
3. leading the group that first identified the genetic diversity revealing high mobility and gene flow in the Viking world, first published in Krzewińska et al. (2018).Götherström’s current research primarily focuses on the Late Iron Age, Viking Age, and medieval periods.

Ferenc Jordán is Hungarian biologist, systems ecologist (PhD 1999, ELTE, Budapest). His main interest is ecological networks including food webs, animal social networks and landscape connectivity graphs, among others. He was Branco Weiss Fellow in Collegium Budapest, Principal Investigator at The Microsoft Research – COSBI in Trento, Italy and Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany. He worked also for the Center for Ecological Research in Hungary and led a project at the University of Parma in Italy. Presently he is Group Leader in Institute of Biological Research in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and Associated Researcher at Stazione Zoologica, Napoli, Italy. He serves on several panels and editorial boards and recently increasingly active in science communication.

After completing his primary and secondary schools in Miskolc (Hungary), he graduated as a geologist from the Moscow Geological University in 1977. His first job was at the Geological Institute of Hungary, where he worked until 2005. He then moved to the Institute of Mineralogy and Geology of the University of Miskolc, where he became a professor in 2010. He obtained his PhD degree in 1993, from the R. Eötvös University of Science (Budapest). In 2008, he habilitated at the University of Miskolc, and in the same year he also obtained the title of Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His professional activities are two-fold. One is geological mapping, in the framework of which he worked in Aggtelek-Rudabánya and Bükk Mts. (NE Hungary) and in Central Libya. As a result, new geological maps and explanatory booklets about these areas were published under his leadership. The other major direction is the study of Eurasian Paleogene larger foraminifera (giant unicellulars). The most outstanding achievement is the monographic revision of orthophragmines previously considered stratigraphically worthless using extensive European material. The stratigraphic subdivision he developed was incorporated into the Tethyan Paleocene-Eocene shallow benthic zonation based on larger foraminifera. He has received a total of 3103 independent citations for his 220 published publications.