Rate My Professor Robin Allaby

Professor Robin Allaby is a Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. He earned a BSc Hons from King’s College London in 1991 and a PhD from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1996. His principal research interest over the past 30 years has been to understand the evolution of plant domestication, working with archaeologists and employing archaeogenomic techniques alongside computational models that connect archaeological data with genetics. Research from his group indicates that the origins of domestication lie far back in time and are associated with deep human ecologies, with selection pressures beginning in the epi-Palaeolithic and evidence that past societies maintained biodiversity and were connected over large distances. A connected area of research involves the reconstruction of palaeoenvironments using sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) to track environmental resilience from the latter stages of the last ice age through periods of warming and sea level rises, providing broader context for studies of domestication. He develops and applies ancient DNA methods using next-generation sequencing technologies, comparative and population genomics, and genetic models to identify signatures of selection and reconstruct population structures. Professor Allaby is a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a Fellow of the Society of Biologists. He serves as Associate Editor for PLOS One and for Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. Recent publications include work on early colonization in Southern Doggerland revealed by sedimentary ancient DNA (2026), a universally applicable definition for domestication (2025), and progress in domestication research explaining expanded empirical observations (2023). He leads the Environment & Ecology research cluster and is affiliated with the Plant & Agricultural Biosciences cluster.