Following his graduation and doctorate in Bioinformatics and his first lectureship at the University of Tübingen, Alexander Herbig has been head of the research group Computational Pathogenomics, which is part of the Department of Archaeogenetics at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The research group mainly focusses on exploring the evolution of different human pathogens, e.g. the plague, by isolating their genetic material from archaeological finds. In addition to that, they are developing methods to detect and reconstruct the corresponding genetic material and to perform comparative analyses.