Lachie Scarsbrook

I’m a geneticist from New Zealand, and part of the Wellcome Trust Palaeogenomics and Bio-Archaeology Research Network. I use ancient DNA to investigate the role that humans and the environment play in shaping global animal populations. At the Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka (University of Otago), my research focused on the characterisation of extinct faunal diversity in Aotearoa (New Zealand) through morphometric and genomic analyses of pre-human subfossil remains. As part of this work I described a new species of gecko, which was named through collaboration with local Māori iwi (Te Āti Awa). My current DFG-funded postdoctoral research is a continuation of my DPhil at Oxford, where I utilise ancient DNA to reconstruct ancestry and selection throughout the ~20,000 year evolutionary history of domestic dogs. This ranges from identifying shared coevolutionary histories of humans and dogs, to understanding the drivers and consequences of strong artificial selection in dogs over the past two centuries.