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29 January 2025

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St Hugh’s Alumnus appointed Director at Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

Congratulations to St Hugh’s alumnus Dr Patrick Roberts (Archaeology & Anthropology, 2009) who has been named Director at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. Patrick will head the new Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation which will investigate long-term interactions between land use change and urbanisation and their relevance for human-Earth system relationships. Patrick has been leader of the isoTROPIC independent research group and lead scientist of the Department of Archaeology at MPI-GEA since 2022.

Patrick’s research applies a variety of methodologies to study interactions between humans and the Earth system, including archaeology, biochemistry, palaeoecology, remote sensing, history, and land cover modelling. In 2021 he became the first archaeologist to receive the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the top award for early career investigators in Germany. Roberts was also awarded the Thuringian Research Prize for top performance in basic research by the Thuringian Ministry of Economy, Science and the Digital Society in 2024.

On his appointment Patrick said, ‘Understanding the co-evolution of urbanisation and land use will undoubtedly be critical to our future on this planet; and I look forward to collaborating closely with the other departments at MPI-GEA, as well as interdisciplinary colleagues around the world, to explore this process on different temporal and spatial scales.’

St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Archaeology, Professor Peter Mitchell, who was Patrick’s tutor, commented, ‘I am delighted that Patrick has been appointed to this prestigious role. He was one of the strongest Archaeology & Anthropology students to have studied at St Hugh’s, and I am extremely proud of what he has gone on to achieve since finishing his undergraduate degree here in 2012 and his subsequent MSc (2013) and DPhil (2016).’

The MPI-GEA was founded in 2022 to study the past, present, and future of our species’ interactions with the Earth system. Land use change is one of the most tangible expressions of this relationship. Indeed, global intensification of land use is argued to be a key component of life in the Anthropocene and the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human-Earth system interactions. Urbanisation is a particularly significant form of land use, given that two-thirds of the human population will live in cities by 2050.

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