Michael Hammer is a Research Scientist in the Arizona Research Laboratories (ARL) Division of Biotechnology at the University of Arizona, with joint appointments in Anthropology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He received his Ph.D. with Allan C. Wilson at the University of California, Berkeley, and did postdoctoral work with Lee M. Silver at Princeton University and Richard C. Lewontin at Harvard University. When he moved to Arizona in 1991, he was pursuing studies of variation on the Y chromosome as a model system to explore human evolution. His laboratory is currently constructing a novel re-sequencing database of loci throughout the genome to understand better the evolutionary processes that shape human variation and to test models of human origins.

Ph.D. UC Berkeley 1984

With the recent completion of the human and chimpanzee genome sequences, there is now a concerted effort to describe patterns of DNA variation across the genome in populations of humans and our closest living relatives. This endeavor is motivated not only by our curiosity about human and chimpanzee evolution, but also by our interest in the genetic basis of disease and complex traits. Research in the Hammer lab is directed at comparing patterns of DNA sequence variation to reconstruct the origins of our species, ancient hominid population structure, the history of human migration, and to identify the signal of natural selection acting on a variety of genes.