I am a Professor of Scientific Archaeology at the University of Vienna. My research focuses on developing and improving the radiocarbon method and its application to archaeology. I have worked in particular on pretreatment chemistry methods to remove contaminants from bone collagen samples, which has included developing several innovative methods now used by other laboratories.

My academic career spans several major international institutions. For my DPhil and early career I worked at the Waikato Radiocarbon Laboratory in New Zealand, where I served as Deputy Director. In 2001 I joined the University of Oxford, where I spent two decades at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. During this period I became Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. I took up a Professorship at the University of Vienna in 2021 and have established a radiocarbon dating facility here with a growing group of researchers and students.

I won a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced award which ran until mid-2019 for a project focused on the extinction of Neanderthals and the dispersal of modern humans across Eurasia between 50-30,000 BP. I obtained a second ERC grant which started in 2024 for working on the Initial Upper Palaeolithic and the site of Ksâr’ Akil.

I am the author of the book "The World Before Us: How Science Is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins" (Penguin, UK), which presents recent scientific discoveries about human evolution to a broader audience. I've published more than 250 scientific papers.

I have extensive research and collaborative links with dozens of archaeologists, geneticists, geologists and earth scientists from a range of university and research groups, and work on archaeological sites across Eurasia, the Americas, Australasia, SE Asia and the Pacific.