Janet Kelso

Janet Kelso (born 1975) is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans (i.e. Neanderthals) with those of the present (Homo Sapiens).

A previous challenge for computational biologists was the lack of proper DNA preservation and technology to analyze the nuclear genomes of the ancient humans. This obstacle strengthened Kelso's interest in bioinformatics and initially approached the issue using the reference based method. From there, her and her research team have made advances in research towards ancient DNA. Provided by Wikipedia