Dr. Niraj Rai is a Human population geneticist by training, specializing in the use of next-generation sequencing data to study human population history. He works closely with archaeologists and anthropologists studying South and Southeast Asia to understand present population diversity and demographic changes over the time. While genomes from modern individuals can inform about present-day population structure, ancient genomes provide unprecedented insight into the past demographic events and processes that have shaped the present-day gene pool. Population genetics has recently witnessed an explosion in studies on genetic history using ancient DNA, primarily from Europe and the Americas. India has very little representation in the ancient genomic literature despite the wealth of archaeological samples that exist in collections all over the country. In his work he generates ancient, as well as modern, sequence data, and use computational tools to identify signals of migrations, admixture, drift and natural selection in human populations. His work extends to animal genetics, and to sequencing the ancient pathogens that infected our ancestors. He has created a world class ancient DNA facility at Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow. He is an Associate Researcher at Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, USA and Scientist-D (Sr. Scientist) & Group Head, Ancient DNA at DST- Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow.