Erika Hagelberg

Erika Hagelberg is a British Evolutionary geneticist and Professor of Biosciences at the University of Oslo. She works on ancient DNA and pioneered a means to extract DNA from bones. Her research has applications in evolutionary biology and forensic science.
Education and early career.
At the age of 13, Hagelberg's father escaped from Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom on the Kindertransport in 1939. Hagelberg studied biochemistry at the University of London and earned her bachelor's degree in 1977. She moved to the University of Cambridge for her doctoral studies, earning her PhD in 1983. Traditionally, DNA could only be found in soft tissues, but Hagelberg developed techniques to recover small quantities of DNA from bone. Once the DNA has been extracted, it is possible to use the polymerase chain reaction to determine the sequence of amino acids.
Research.
Hagelberg works in the analysis of ancient DNA from archaeological bones. She joined the University of Oxford in 1987, where she worked at the John Radcliffe Hospital alongside Bryan Sykes and Robert E. M. Hedges. At Oxford Hagelberg collaborated with Alec Jeffreys on the applications of bone DNA in forensic science. Jeffreys once described her as being able to “get DNA out of a stone, just about,". Jeffreys and Hagelberg worked on single tandem repeat typing. Her early work included the analysis of bones from the Mary Rose. Hagelberg identified pig DNA in a leg bone from the food stores in the Mary Rose.
Jeffreys and Hagelberg demonstrated the DNA analysis could be used to identify the skeletal remains of a murder victim. Unfortunately, the body had been in the ground for so long that it had disintegrated. They could not use conventional DNA fingerprinting to analyse the DNA, and had to develop more sophisticated techniques. In the 1990s she was one of the first people to use bone DNA analysis for forensic identification. Hagelberg's DNA extraction technique was used to identify bones found in Brazil that were believed to belong to Josef Mengele. With Jeffreys, Hagelberg extracted DNA from a skeleton that had been buried for several years, and compared it with that of Mengele's family members. Their discovery closed a case of war crime that had stayed open for half a century. She also participated in the identification of remains of the Romanov family. This involved the analysis of nine skeletons, including those of the putative Tsarina and three of her daughters, and comparing their DNA to that of living descendants. She has also used mitochondrial DNA to study the migration of human populations. She has also extracted DNA from mammoth bones.
In 1998 Hagelberg left Cambridge and joined the University of Otago in New Zealand. Here continued her research on human migrations in the Pacific Islands, by examining mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms in Polynesian and Melanesian bones to resolve conflicting opinions on the migratory patterns. She also investigated the genetic origins of the people of the Andaman Islands. She found that the Andamanese are genetically more similar to Asian as opposed to African populations, predicting they are descendants of the paleolithic colonies in Southeast Asia. Hagelberg has also written on the evolution of language, and how social complexity is related to brain size. She is interested in how reliable mitochondrial DNA is in studies of human evolution and phylogenetics.
In 2002 Hagelberg joined the University of Oslo. Hagelberg investigates how definitions of biological race are used by evolutionary biologists. Her work has been covered in The Guardian, The New York Times.
She has contributed to several books, including the Oxford Companion to Archaeology and Life and Death in Asia Minor in Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Times: Studies in Archaeology and Bioarchaeology. She edited a themed issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on Ancient DNA.