Johanna L.A. Paijmans

My research interests have a strong focus on tracing population shifts in response to environmental changes (e.g. climate change), using the palaeogenomic toolkit. Understanding the long-term movement and adaptation of species under the influence of changing environment is vital to understand how populations adapt (or fail to adapt) to new challenges. I am particularly excited about ancient DNA, as it allows for the investigation of extirpated populations and extinct species. These are essentially cases where the population or species failed to adapt to an environmental change, and thus of importance to study for future conservation of modern populations.

Johanna started her Bachelor degree in Science Based Archeology at Leiden University (the Netherlands) in 2004. In 2009, she moved to University of York (UK) to do a Master’s degree in Biological Archaeology. She first started working in the field of palaeogenetics during her Master’s project with Prof. Michael Hofreiter, after which she continued doing her PhD in the same group. In 2013 she moved with the Hofreiter group to the University of Potsdam (Germany), and finished her there PhD in 2016. She continued working as postdoc in Potsdam, and then briefly at the Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Joerns Fickel. From 2019-2021 she took a career break for family reasons, and in 2021 was awarded a Marie Curie Career Restart Fellowship to return to her research career.

She is currently a Marie Curie fellow at University of Cambridge in the group from Prof. Andrea Manica, in a collaborative project with Dr. Axel Barlow and others, investigating population dynamics of the extinct cave bear.