Dr. Spencer Wells

Spencer Wells is a scientist, author and explorer living on the island of Lombok in Indonesia. In his past life he was an academic, a writer and documentary filmmaker, an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, and a successful entrepreneur. His training is in population genetics (Ph.D. at Harvard and postdoctoral research at Stanford and Oxford), using it as a tool to study human prehistory — particularly our journey as a species to populate the world over the past 100,000 years. These days he’s far more likely to be found at an archaeological site or floating over a remote Indonesian coral reef than in a lab.