After obtaining his undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Bielefeld in 2006, Matthias Steinruecken received his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin in 2009. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Yun S. Song in the Departments of Statistics and EECS at the University of California in Berkeley.  He is interested in problems in applied and theoretical population genetics, specifically in inferring complex demographic histories from whole genome sequence data, and admixture deconvolution in the context of ancient hominins. Furthermore, he studies the dynamics of selection via diffusion processes and uses these to infer selection strength from ancient DNA or time series data.