Tom Gilbert is Professor of Palaeogenomics at the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark and Adjunct Professor at Curtin University. He obtained his D.Phil from Oxford where his research focused on the challenges of working with ancient genetic materials. In 2003 he moved to a postdoctoral position at the University of Arizona, to develop methods for recovering RNA from archival biopsies. Since moving to Copenhagen in 2005 his research group has worked on ancient biomolecules, as well as modern genomic and metagenomic data. In 2010 Gilbert, with others, created the Avian Phylogenome Consortium.