Richard E. Green (Ed) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, USA in 1972. He graduated from the University of Georgia (B.Sc. Genetics) in 1997. Ed was a Peace Corps Volunteer (Barentu, Eritrea) in 1997-98. Ed studied with Steven Brenner at the University of California, Berkeley where he got his PhD in 2005 on computational algorithms for sequence analysis and alternative splicing. As an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Ed pioneered the use of high-throughput sequencing in ancient DNA. He was first author of the paper in Science describing the Neanderthal genome which won the Newcombe-Cleveland prize. As Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Ed co-directs the UCSC Paleogenomics lab. His research focuses on comparative genomics, population genetics, and DNA technology development. Ed is co-founder of Dovetail Genomics, Claret Biosciences, and Astrea Forensics. He is a Kavli Scholar, a Searle Scholar, and a Sloan Scholar, author of more than 100 research manuscripts and 12 US patents.