Lachie Scarsbrook
Fulford Junior Research Fellow
Lachie is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Oxford’s School of Archaeology, and a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College.
A biologist by training, Lachie’s research sits at the interface between the human and life sciences, employing the “celebrity science” of ancient DNA to investigate the role that humans and the environment play in shaping global animal populations. More specifically, he is focused on unravelling the causes and consequences of millennia of interaction between humans and their closest evolutionary companion, dogs.
Lachie is from New Zealand, where he completed both his undergraduate and master’s degrees (in Geology and Zoology) at the University of Otago. He then moved to the United Kingdom to undertake a DPhil in Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford (Merton College), funded by a Clarendon scholarship. In 2024, he began his Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by a German Research Council Grant, with the specific aim of assessing the consequences of strong artificial selection on purebred dogs over the last two centuries.