大卫·E·里奇

大卫·E·里奇（英语：David Emil Reich，1974年7月14日—）是一位美国遗传学家，主要研究领域是古人类的群体遗传学，即通过全基因组关联分析来发现人类的迁徙和种群的混合。

David Emil Reich (born July 14, 1974) is an American geneticist known for his work on the phylogenetics and migration history of humans through statistical analysis of contemporary populations and ancient DNA, and is considered a founding figure in the fields of population genomics and paleogenetics. In particular, he has focused on the genetic history of Europe, and on archaic admixture between modern humans, neanderthals, and denisovans. He is a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, an associate of the Broad Institute, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Reich was highlighted as one of Nature's 10 for his contributions to science in 2015. He received the Dan David Prize in 2017, the NAS Award in Molecular Biology, the Wiley Prize, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal in 2019, and the Massry Prize in 2021.

Early life and education

Reich grew up as part of a Jewish family in Washington, D.C. His parents are novelist Tova Reich (sister of Rabbi Avi Weiss) and Walter Reich, a professor at George Washington University, who served as the first director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. During high school, Reich attended the Research Science Institute at MIT. Reich started out as a sociology major as an undergraduate at Harvard College, but later turned his attention to physics and medicine and earned a B.A. in the subject. After graduation, he attended the University of Oxford, originally with the intent of preparing for medical school. He was awarded a D.Phil. in zoology from St Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1999 for research supervised by David Goldstein. His thesis was titled "Genetic analysis of human evolutionary history with implications for gene mapping".

Academic career

He joined Harvard Medical School in 2003. In 2013, his lab finished construction on the first facility dedicated to the sequencing and analysis of ancient human genetics. His research includes a focus on medical genetics, population admixture among modern humans and its archaic sister species, and the demographic history of Europe and Eurasia. In 2026, Reich and colleagues published a paper which in part included evidence from over 10,000 newly sequenced ancient genomes, increasing the amount of ancient genomes avaiable for peer research and collaboration by orders of magnitude. This database included robust evidence of strong trends in natural selection among modern humans in the last 10,000 years, a position previously hotly debated. His lab is responsible for developing a range of statistical methods used in analyzing demographic history from genome sequencing, in particular those used to identify ancient admixture in modern populations.

Genetic research

Split of chimpanzees and humans (2006)

Reich's research team at Harvard University has produced evidence that, over a span of at least four million years, various parts of the human genome diverged gradually from those of chimpanzees. The split between the human and chimpanzee lineages may have occurred millions of years later than fossilized bones suggest, and the break may not have been as clean as previously thought. The genetic evidence developed by Reich's team suggests that after the two species initially separated, they may have continued interbreeding for several million years.

A final genetic split transpired between 6.3 million and 5.4 million years ago.