Toomas Kivisild (born 11 August 1969, in Tapa, Estonia) is an Estonian population geneticist. He graduated as a biologist and received his PhD in Genetics, from University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2000. Since then he has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Medicine, at Stanford University (2002-3), Estonian Biocentre (since 2003), as the Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Tartu (2005-6), and as a Lecturer and Reader in Human Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (2006-2018). From 2018 he is a professor in the Department of Human Genetics at KU Leuven and a senior researcher at the Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu.^[1][2]

Kivisild has focused in his research on questions relating global genetic population structure with evolutionary processes such as selection, drift, migrations and admixture.^[3] He coauthored the second edition of the textbook Human Evolutionary Genetics (2013).^[4][5]

Selected publications

• 1999a. "Deep common ancestry of Indian and western-Eurasian mitochondrial DNA lineages" [1]
• 1999b. "The Place of the Indian mtDNA Variants in the Global Network of Maternal Lineages and the Peopling of the Old World" [2]
• 2000a. "An Indian Ancestry: a Key for Understanding Human Diversity in Europe and Beyond" [3]
• 2000b. "The origins of southern and western Eurasian populations: an mtDNA study" [4]
• 2003a. "The Genetics of Language and Farming Spread in India" [5]
• 2003b. "The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations" [6], [7]
• The emerging limbs and twigs of the East Asian mtDNA tree. [8]^{[permanent dead link]} [9]
• Kivisild, T; Reidla, M; Metspalu, E; et al. (November 2004). "Ethiopian mitochondrial DNA heritage: tracking gene flow across and around the gate of tears". Am. J. Hum. Genet. 75 (5): 752–70. doi:10.1086/425161. PMC 1182106. PMID 15457403.
• Mait, Metspalu; Kivisild, Toomas; et al. (2004). "Most of the extant mtDNA boundaries in South and Southwest Asia were likely shaped during the initial settlement of Eurasia by anatomically modern humans". BMC Genetics. 5: 26. doi:10.1186/1471-2156-5-26. PMC 516768. PMID 15339343. [10]
• 2005a. Different population histories of the Mundari- and Mon-Khmer-speaking Austro-Asiatic tribes inferred from the mtDNA 9-bp deletion/insertion polymorphism in Indian populations [11]^{[dead link]}
• 2005b. Reconstructing the Origin of Andaman Islanders [12]
• 2005c. Tracing Modern Human Origins [13]
• 2006a. Response to Comment on‘‘Reconstructing the Origin of Andaman Islanders’’ [14]
• 2006b. Sahoo, S.; Kivisild, T; et al. (2006). "A prehistory of Indian Y chromosomes: Evaluating demic diffusion scenarios". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 103 (4): 843–8. Bibcode:2006PNAS..103..843S. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507714103. PMC 1347984. PMID 16415161.
• 2006c. The role of selection in the evolution of human mitochondrial genomes. [15]
• 2007. Peopling of South Asia: investigating the caste-tribe continuum in India [16]^{[dead link]}
• 2007. Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia by Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis