Alan Cooper is a New Zealand evolutionary molecular biologist and an ancient DNA researcher. He is considered a significant figure in the field of ancient DNA, and was involved in many of the early discoveries in the field. He was the inaugural director of both the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at the University of Oxford from 2001–2005, and the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, South Australia from 2005–2019. In December 2019 he was dismissed from Adelaide for serious misconduct.
In 1999, Cooper established the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at the University of Oxford and in 2002 was made Professor of Ancient Biomolecules at Oxford. In 2004, he was awarded an Australian Research CouncilFederation Fellowship, and resigned from Oxford in 2005, moving to the University of Adelaide to establish the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. At Adelaide, he led the Ancient DNA node of the Genographic Project examining human origins and dispersal from 2005–2010. He was awarded a series of ARC Fellowships: Federation, Future, and Laureate researching human evolution and climate change. Cooper was suspended from the University of Adelaide in September 2019, following allegations that he bullied staff and students at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, which he denied. He was dismissed in December 2019 for serious misconduct.
Research
Cooper has published over 27 papers in the journals Nature and Science. In 2000, with Henrik Poinar, he suggested that the standards of much ancient DNA research were insufficient to rule out contamination, especially in studies of ancient humans. In 2001, he used these methods to characterise the first complete mitochondrial genome sequences from extinct species, two New Zealand moa. Cooper has analysed ancient DNA from extinct species preserved in caves, permafrost areas of Alaska and the Yukon, Antarctica, and sedimentary and archaeological deposits around the world. He has published on the evolutionary history of a range of enigmatic extinct species including: New Zealand moa and Madagascan elephant bird, the Dodo, American lion and cheetah-like cat, North and South American horses, steppe bison, bears, cave hyenas, mammoth, and the Falkland Islands wolf. He has also shown that the calcified plaque on the teeth of ancient skeletons can be used to reconstruct the evolution of the human microbiome through time.
