David Reich

Reich grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. His mother is the novelist Tova Reich, and his father, a George Washington University professor, was the first director of the Holocaust Museum.⁠[1][2]

Reich graduated from Harvard College in 1996; he first concentrated in social studies before switching to physics, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics. He then went to Oxford, where he worked with mentor David Goldstein on statistical methods for learning about evolutionary history and completed his doctorate in 1999.⁠[1][2]

Reich completed the first two years of medical school in the HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry–MIT Health Sciences and Technology program before leaving it for postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research; in 2002, as a postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander, he met the mathematician Nick Patterson.⁠[2][1]

Reich joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 2003, where he initially searched for disease genes, including several linked to prostate cancer.⁠[2][1]

In 2006 Reich led work suggesting that the human and chimpanzee lineages may have continued to interbreed for perhaps a million years after they diverged.⁠[1]

At Svante Pääbo’s invitation Reich studied the Neanderthal genome, and his 2010 analysis found that modern humans had interbred with Neanderthals; a later analysis dated the interbreeding to 54,000–49,000 years ago. Later in 2010 his team used DNA from a juvenile finger bone to identify the Denisovans, a previously unknown archaic group.⁠[1]

Reich received tenure in 2011, became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2013 and that year built the first state-of-the-art ancient DNA laboratory for genome-wide human DNA in the United States.⁠[2]

On July 13, 2018, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry (a16z) released the a16z Podcast episode “a16z Podcast: The Scientific Revolution of Ancient DNA,” in which Jorge CondeJorge CondeJorge Conde is a biotechnology entrepreneur and a general partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).Open the full entry, a general partner on a16z’s Bio + Health team, and Hanne Tidnam spoke with Reich about his book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019.⁠[3][4]

In the episode Reich compared reconstructing ancient humans from present-day people to rebuilding an explosion from its fragments, and described how technological advances had opened a new window onto the human past and present. The conversation began with the “black hole” surrounding “Mitochondrial Eve,” moved through major discoveries made possible by new tools, and discussed what archaic humans and ancient DNA reveal about human biology and identity.⁠[3]

About three months before the COVID-19 pandemic, Reich joined Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in human evolutionary biology, and he has since divided his time between laboratories in Cambridge and Longwood.⁠[1]

Members of Reich’s lab co-organized a 2020 virtual conference that led to a 2021 Nature paper on ethical guidelines for ancient DNA analysis.⁠[1]

In 2010 scientists had assembled five ancient human genomes; by June 2022 Reich’s lab alone had sequenced more than 16,000 ancient individuals.⁠[1]

The Reich lab focuses on ancient DNA and human biology and maintains the AADR compendium of published ancient DNA data along with population genetics software including EIGENSOFT and ADMIXTOOLS.⁠[5]

David Reich Lab: Official website: https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]