Dr. Stephan Schuster graduated with a PhD in Biochemistry from the Max-Planck-Institute of Technology and did post-doctoral research at the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. After a successful post-doctoral stint, he returned to assume several teaching and research positions at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry, Developmental Biology and Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Germany. He joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Pennsylvania State University as Associate Professor and has been full Professor there for the last three years. He serves as member of the Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics, Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics as well as Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University. He is also conjoint Professor of Faculty of Medicine at University of New South Wales, Australia. His research work focuses on a wide range of evolutionary topics to explore genetic diversity of natural populations. His group sequenced the whole nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth and has subsequently unraveled sequences of several different organisms. His work has won several awards and accolades including Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2006 (runner up) and 2008 (top 10), Time Magazine's Top Ten Scientific Discoveries in 2008, and was among Time Magazine's top 100 most influential people of 2009 with W. Miller. His current area of research focuses on extinction genomics, human genomics, microbial genomics, metagenomics, and bioinformatics.