L.L. Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Cavalli-Sforza, October 2010.
Born	(1922-01-25) 25 January 1922 (age 96) Genoa, Italy
Occupation	Geneticist
Awards	Weldon Memorial Prize (1978)

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (Italian: [luˈiːdʒi ˈluːka kaˈvalli ˈsfɔrtsa]; born 25 January 1922) is an Italian-born population geneticist, who has been a professor (now emeritus) at Stanford University since 1970.

Cavalli-Sforza entered Ghislieri College in Pavia in 1939 and he received his M.D. from the University of Pavia in 1944. In 1949, he was appointed to a research post at the Department of Genetics, Cambridge University by the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald A. Fisher in the field of E. coli genetics. In 1950, he left the University of Cambridge to teach in northern Italy, Milan, Parma, and Pavia, and before finally taking up a professorship at Stanford in 1970, where he remains as an Emeritus Professor.

In 1999 he won the Balzan Prize for the Science of human origins. He has been a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 1994. He was awarded the Telesio-Galilei Academy Award in 2011 for Biology.

Cavalli-Sforza initiated a new field of research by combining the concrete findings of demography with a newly-available analysis of blood groups in an actual human population. He also studied the connections between migration patterns and blood groups.

Writing in the mid-1960s with another genetics student of Ronald A. Fisher, Anthony W. F. Edwards, Cavalli-Sforza pioneered statistical methods for estimating evolutionary trees (phylogenies); to estimate evolutionary trees, they used maximum likelihood estimation. Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza wrote about trees of populations within the human species, where genetic differences are affected both by treelike patterns of historical separation of populations and by spread of genes among populations by migration and admixture. In later papers, Cavalli-Sforza has written about the effects of both divergence and migration on human gene frequencies.