Ed Green joined the Biomolecular Engineering faculty at UC Santa Cruz recently as a world expert in early human genome biology. Dr. Green provided the main bioinformatics analysis of the first Neanderthal genome sequence that showed modern humans carry some Neanderthal genes. His work won the Newcomb award for best paper in the journal Science in 2010, and Dr. Green continues in his groundbreaking research on mapping the recent evolutionary history of out-of-African human populations, the ancestral relationship between brown bears and polar bears, as well as comparative genome sequencing of the salt-water crocodile and American alligator. Dr. Green received his Bachelor’s in genetics from the University of Georgia, Athens, his doctorate in molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.