Who's Who At Family Tree DNA

Michael Hammer

Mike Hammer is FTDNA's Chief Scientist, and member of the Scientific Advisory Board.

A Biotechnology Research Scientist at the University of Arizona with appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, as well as Director of the Genomic Analysis and Technology Core facility, Dr. Hammer received his PhD in Genetics from the University of California at Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton and Harvard Universities. He co-authored the first paper showing that present-day Cohanim are descended from a single male ancestor.

Bruce Walsh

Bruce Walsh is our Chief Population Geneticist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board.

An expert on population genetics and statistical applications in genetics and co-author of one of the leading texts in this area, Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits, Lynch and Walsh, 1997, Dr. Walsh served on the editorial boards of the journals Genetics; Genetical Research; Theoretical Population Biology; Evolution and The American Naturalist. He received his PhD in Genetics from the University of Washington.

Doron Behar

Doron Behar is our Chief mtDNA Scientist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board.

Population geneticist and Senior Physician at the Department of Critical Care Medicine at the Rambam Medical Center, Haifa. Dr. Behar has pioneered scientific research on DNA variations of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome in Jewish and Near Eastern populations. Dr. Behar is currently focusing on large scale mtDNA-based population genetic studies.

Theodore G. Schurr

Tad Schurr is a member of FTDNA's Scientific Advisory Board.

Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Schurr spent the last 12 years investigating the genetic prehistory of Asia and the Americas. He has worked on the mapping and identification of genes that contribute to cardiovascular disease risk in Native American groups, and received his PhD in Anthropology from Emory University.

Thomas Krahn

Thomas Krahn is our Chief Y chromosome scientist and a Member of FTDNA's Scientific Advisory Board.

Thomas has planned and established FTDNA's Genomics Research Center in Houston. He graduated from the Technical University of Berlin with an MSC (Dipl. - Ing.) in biotechnology and genetics. He started his own DNA-Fingerprint laboratory in Germany in 2005, which later became the foundation and knowledge base on which on the GRC laboratory was built. Today, Thomas focuses on Y-Chromosome specific research. He has discovered an uncountable number of new haplogroups. Among them is the oldest contemporary human A00 haplogroup that revolutionized the complete Y-tree topology and extended into the past the understanding of modern humans by more than 50,000 years. He is the inventor of the Walk Through the Y project and maintains the Ymap and Ytree databases that FTDNA provides at no cost to the scientific community.

Connie Bormans

Dr. Bormans received her Ph.D. in genetics from Texas A&M University where she developed new STR marker panels for use in plant breeding. As a Research Fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, she managed three large scale projects to identify genes related to cardiovascular disease. She is currently focused on developing efficient methods for large scale genotyping projects using both direct sequencing and STR analysis.

Spencer Wells

Spencer Wells is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Professor at Cornell University. He leads The Genographic Project, which is collecting and analyzing hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people around the world in order to decipher how our ancestors populated the planet. Wells received his Ph.D. in population genetics from Harvard University and conducted postdoctoral work at Stanford and Oxford. He has appeared in numerous documentary films and is the author of three books, The Journey of Man, Deep Ancestry and Pandora's Seed.

Eran Halpern

Eran Halperin is a senior research scientist in the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California and an associate professor in Tel-Aviv University in the School of Computer Science and in the Department of Microbiology. His research group works on computational methods for the analysis of population genetics data. His group has developed methods that have been used by thousands of researchers worldwide in order to understand the genetic causes of diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Professor Halperin has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles across different disciplines including human and population genetics, computational biology, algorithms, and operations research. He received various honors for academic achievements, including the Rothschild Fellowship, the Intel, and the Krill prizes. Professor Halperin received his Ph.D. in computer science from Tel-Aviv University.

Bennett Greenspan

An entrepreneur and life-long genealogy enthusiast, Mr. Greenspan founded Family Tree DNA in 1999, turning - dare we say - a hobby into a full-time vocation. Together with Max Blankfeld, they founded in 1997 GoCollege.com a website for college-bound students which survived the .COM implosion.

Max Blankfeld

Originally from Brazil, received his BBA from Fundação Getulio Vargas, and MBA from Rice University. While his first college education was in the field of Aeronautical Engineering, he gave it up to become a foreign correspondent. After that, he started and managed several successful ventures in the area of public relations as well as consumer goods both in Brazil and the US.