About

David Reich is a Principal Investigator at Harvard University, leading the David Reich Lab which focuses on ancient DNA, biology, and disease. His research involves the study of ancient genomes to understand human history, evolution, and the genetic basis of diseases. The lab employs advanced genomic techniques to analyze ancient DNA samples, contributing to our understanding of human migrations, population interactions, and the genetic diversity of ancient populations. Reich's work is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, integrating genetics, archaeology, and anthropology to reconstruct historical human populations and their movements. His contributions have significantly advanced the field of ancient genomics, providing insights into the complex history of human ancestry and the genetic factors influencing health and disease across different populations.

Research topics

• Geography
• Biology
• Archaeology
• Demography
• Evolutionary biology
• Sociology
• History
• Genetics
• Computer Science
• Ethnology
• Ancient history
• Political Science
• Computational biology
• Paleontology
• Genealogy
• Public relations
• Linguistics
• Geology
• Engineering ethics
• Anthropology
• Engineering
• Agroforestry
• Fishery

Selected publications

• Genomic approaches for understanding the evolution of the human brain

  Nature Neuroscience · 2026-04-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Optimal Reference Panel Design in Ancient DNA Imputation from Coalescent Theory, Simulation, and Real Data Application with an Ancient Reference Panel

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-04-28

  articleOpen access

  Imputation is widely used in the ancient DNA (aDNA) field to determine which phenotypically important alleles ancient individuals carried, to study natural selection, and to detect segments of the genome that are shared between individuals identical by descent. However, rare variant imputation is less accurate, and rare variants tend to be excluded from downstream analyses. State-of-the-art imputation methods leverage large reference panels, improving rare variant accuracy in modern targets. However, it is unclear how to identify optimal panels for aDNA targets. It seems plausible that aDNA reference panels would improve imputation of aDNA, but no such panels have been assembled or tested. We leveraged analytical results from coalescent theory and complementary simulations to evaluate both performance of large modern panels, and ancient panels' impact on aDNA imputation. For modern panels, sample sizes as small as 5,000 saturate imputation performance and model misspecifications in standard imputation algorithms increase imputation error for rare and intermediate frequency variants. For instance, for European hunter-gatherers, non-reference imputed variants with derived allele frequency less than at least 2% should be removed. Including ancient genomes in a modern reference panel substantially improved imputation accuracy in analytical modelling and simulations, particularly, for rare variants and older samples from groups with low effective population size. We assembled a joint reference panel with 1000 Genomes and 95 ancient samples and used it to impute 95 downsampled genomes, finding modest gains in imputation performance. This approach can rescue rare variants typically discarded from current imputation pipelines and may prove useful as the number of ancient samples increases.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ancient DNA reveals that natural selection has upregulated the immune system over the last 10,000 years

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-04-14

  articleOpen access

  The specific mechanisms through which human biology and disease susceptibility evolved with major shifts in West Eurasian environments and societies over the last 10,000 years( 1 )—particularly rising infectious burden( 2 )—remain poorly characterized, despite ancient DNA studies( 3-6 ) identifying hundreds of candidate loci under positive selection( 6 ). Here, we identify specific immune diseases/traits, genes/variants, pathways, and tissues/cell types impacted by natural selection by systematically integrating variant-level selection statistics with genome-wide association study (GWAS), quantitative trait locus (QTL), and molecular bulk/single-cell and gene pathway data. Genome-wide, positively-selected alleles are associated with reduced susceptibility to infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB), influenza, and intestinal infections; consistent with selection-signal enrichments in immune cells within barrier tissues such as the respiratory tract and gut mucosa. In contrast, positively-selected alleles increase risk of intestinal inflammatory disease and autoimmune hypothyroidism, supportive of a tradeoff between infection and immune-mediated pathology, and consistent with adaptive alleles being QTLs for genes upregulating inflammation and other host-defense pathways. We reveal many novel adaptive loci with convergent signals from selection, infectious disease GWAS and immune-gene QTLs (including at FUT6 for intestinal infections; at ASAP1 for TB; and at LYZ , an antimicrobial enzyme), fine-mapping selection onto likely causal variants. Surprisingly, adaptive alleles had a protective effect on allergic conditions like asthma and dermatitis, challenging a common view that these conditions arose through evolutionary mismatch of present-day hygienic contexts relative to past, pathogen-rich environments( 7 ).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia

  Nature · 2026-04-15 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history1, but its potential to reveal as much about human evolutionary biology has not been realized because of limited sample sizes and the difficulty of distinguishing sustained rises in allele frequency increasing fitness—directional selection—from shifts due to migrations, population structure, or non-adaptive purifying or stabilizing selection2–7. Here we present a method for detecting directional selection in ancient DNA time-series data that tests for consistent trends in allele frequency change over time, and apply it to 15,836 West Eurasians (10,016 with new data). Previous work has shown that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution8,9. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits. Analysis of 15,836 ancient West Eurasian genomes reveals hundreds of instances of directional selection, showing that sustained changes in allele frequency were widespread, rather than being rare over this period as previously assumed.

  PublisherDOI

• Long-term hunter-gatherer continuity in the Rhine-Meuse region was disrupted by local formation of expansive Bell Beaker groups

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-03-25 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  The first phase of the ancient DNA revolution painted a broad-brush picture of European Holocene prehistory, whereby 6500-4000 BCE, farmers descending from western Anatolians mixed with local hunter-gatherers resulting in 70-100% ancestry turnover, then 3000-2500 BCE people associated with the Corded Ware complex spread steppe ancestry into north-central Europe. We document an exception to this pattern in the wider Rhine-Meuse area in communities in the wetlands, riverine areas, and coastal areas of the western and central Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany, where we assembled genome-wide data for 109 people 8500-1700 BCE. Here, a distinctive population with high hunter-gatherer ancestry (~50%) persisted up to three thousand years later than in continental European regions, reflecting limited incorporation of females of Early European Farmer ancestry into local communities. In the western Netherlands, the arrival of the Corded Ware complex was also exceptional: lowland individuals from settlements adopting Corded Ware pottery had hardly any steppe ancestry, despite a characteristic early Corded Ware Y-chromosome. The limited influx may reflect the unique ecology of the region's river-dominated landscapes, which were not amenable to wholesale adoption of the early Neolithic type of farming introduced by Linearbandkeramik, making it possible for previously established groups to thrive, and creating a persistent but permeable boundary that allowed transfer of ideas and low-level gene flow. This changed with the formation-through-mixture of Bell Beaker using populations ~2500 BCE by fusion of local Rhine-Meuse people (9-17%) and Corded Ware associated migrants of both sexes. Their expansion from the Rhine-Meuse region then had a disruptive impact across a much wider part of northwest Europe, including Britain where its arrival was the main source of a 90-100% replacement of local Neolithic peoples.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Long shared haplotypes identify the southern Urals as a primary source for the 10th-century Hungarians

  Cell · 2025-10-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  The origins of the early medieval Magyars who appeared in the Carpathian Basin by the end of the 9th century CE remain incompletely understood. Previous archaeogenetic research identified the newcomers as migrants from the Eurasian steppe. However, genome-wide ancient DNA from putative source populations has not been available to test alternative theories of their precise source. We generated genome-wide ancient DNA data for 131 individuals from archaeological sites in the Ural region in northern Eurasia, which are candidates for the source based on historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. Our results tightly link the Magyars to people of the early medieval Karayakupovo archaeological horizon on both the European and Asian sides of the southern Urals. The ancestors of the people of the Karayakupovo archaeological horizon were established in the broader Urals by the Late Iron Age, and their descendants persisted in the Volga-Kama region until at least the 14th century.

  PublisherDOI

• Eight millennia of continuity of a previously unknown lineage in Argentina

  Nature · 2025-11-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A SNP panel for co-analysis of capture and shotgun ancient DNA data

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-07-30 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Advances in technology have decreased the cost of generating genetic variation data from ancient people, resulting in exponentially increasing numbers of individuals with whole genome data. However, each technology comes with platform-specific biases, limiting co-analyzability of individuals sequenced with different technologies as well as joint analysis of modern and ancient individuals. We present a method to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with minimal technology-specific bias. Leveraging data from over 16,300 ancient individuals, we apply this method to identify a set of a million SNPs that we call the “Compatibility” panel, and which has been effectively assayed in a large fraction of ancient human DNA experiments published to date. We also identify a subset of these SNPs, the “Compatibility-HO” panel, which further restricts to positions that have been assayed in more than ten thousand modern individuals from more than a thousand diverse populations using the Affymetrix Human Origins (HO) genotyping array. The Compatibility panel reduces spurious Z -scores due to different sequencing platforms by nearly an order of magnitude, while retaining around 65-85% of statistical power for f -statistic analysis. We also provide a tool for users to select different tradeoffs between bias and power as well as sequencing platforms for their specific analyses.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Addendum to Ancient DNA data from Mengzi Ren, a Late Pleistocene individual from Southeast Asia, cannot be reliably used in population genetic analysis

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-03-26

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  In addition to the issues pointed out in Tabin et al 1 , the MZR data from Zhang et. al 2022 2 are suggestive of high levels of contamination from a source similar to modern Han Chinese, the majority population in the country where MZR was sequenced. In fact, MZR can be modeled entirely as Han-related ancestry and noise. These results raise further concerns about the veracity of the MZR data and thus the paper’s historical conclusions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Murder in cold blood? Forensic and bioarchaeological identification of the skeletal remains of Béla, Duke of Macsó (c. 1245–1272)

  Forensic Science International Genetics · 2025-10-26

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• A new history and geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA

  NSF · $3.0M · 2010–2017

• NIH Grant U01HG004168

  NIH · $991k · 2009

• NIH Grant R01GM100233

  NIH · $2.7M · 2021

• NIH Grant R21AI064519

  NIH · $460k · 2010

• NIH Grant R21DK073818

  NIH · $411k · 2008

Frequent coauthors

• Swapan Mallick

  Broad Institute

  577 shared

• Nadin Rohland

  456 shared

• Nick Patterson

  Broad Institute

  322 shared

• Kristin Stewardson

  Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  267 shared

• Matthew Mah

  Harvard University

  263 shared

• Ïñigo Olalde

  Harvard University

  259 shared

• Arti Tandon

  258 shared

• Ron Pinhasi

  University of Vienna

  244 shared

Labs

• David Reich LabPI

  Ancient DNA, Biology, and Disease

Education

• Ph.D., Genetics

  Harvard University

  1995

• B.A., Molecular and Cell Biology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1990