Mehmet Somel is a Post-doc at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in the Nielsen lab at the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests include human evolution, brain development and ageing, genome/transcriptome evolution, population genetics, genetics of ageing, and genetic effects of plant and animal domestication. He previously worked as a Post-Doc in the Khaitovich lab at the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. The People's Republic of China. He received his Ph.D in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Leipzig in the Department of Evolutionary Genetics in Leipzig, Germany. He has also worked as a teaching assistant in Biostatistics in the Department of Biology at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, where he previously earned his BS in Biology and his MS in Biotechnology.