Janet Kelso

Janet Kelso (born 1975) is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans (i.e. Neanderthals) with those of the present (Homo Sapiens).

A previous challenge for computational biologists was the lack of proper DNA preservation and technology to analyze the nuclear genomes of the ancient humans. This obstacle strengthened Kelso's interest in bioinformatics and initially approached the issue using the reference based method. From there, her and her research team have made advances in research towards ancient DNA.

Education Kelso gained her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Natal in 1995 followed by Honours and Master of Science degrees in medical biochemistry and chemical pathology from the University of Cape Town in 1997 and 2000, respectively.

Research and career Kelso has carried out research in comparative primate genomics and has contributed to the Neanderthal, bonobo and orangutan genome projects. Since 2004, she has been Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Since 2013, she has been co-Executive Editor of the scientific journal Bioinformatics.

Awards and honors Kelso won a L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science Fellowship in 2004. With her co-authors, she was awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the most outstanding paper in Science in 2010: this paper published the draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. She was elected an ISCB Fellow by the International Society for Computational Biology in 2016.