Zeresenay Alemseged - Education and Early Career

Education and Early Career

Alemseged began his professional career as a geologist. After graduating with a B.Sc. in Geology from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia in 1990, he began working as a Junior Geologist in the National Museum of Ethiopia’s Paleoanthropology Laboratory.

After obtaining a French language diploma in 1993, from the International Language School in Vichy, France, he began a M.Sc. program in the Institut des sciences de l'évolution at the University of Montpellier II in France. He completed this program in 1994 and earned a Ph.D. in paleoanthropology through the Laboratory of Paleontology at Pierre and Marie Curie University and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris in 1998.

Alemseged then moved back to Ethiopia, and it was the next year, 1999, while working as a research associate at the National Museum of Ethiopia and the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that he formed the Dikika Research Project (DRP), the first Ethiopian-led paleoanthropological field research project, whose ongoing multi-national and multi-disciplinary mission is aimed at recovering data addressing Alemseged’s primary research interests: hominin evolution and the ways by which that evolution was influenced by the paleoenvironment. Alemseged both leads the project and studies the recovered hominins and other primates.

From 2000 to 2003 Alemseged worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Human Origins in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. It was at the beginning of his postdoctoral research that Alemseged made his most significant discovery of “Selam”. Only one small piece of Selam’s skeleton was found in 2000; it would take an additional six years for her to be fully extracted and analyzed before preliminary results were published in Nature in 2006. In 2004 Alemseged moved back to Europe and became a senior researcher in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Alemseged stayed with the Max Planck Institute until 2008, at which point he became the Curator and Irvine Chair of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, a position which he currently retains.