Dr. Michael Kempf

Michael earned Master’s degrees in Geography, Geology, Meteorology (2010) and Archaeology (2018) from the University of Freiburg. He successfully completed his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) in Physical Geography at the same institution in June 2020. In the spring of 2020, he secured a two-year post-doctoral fellowship, funded by the European Union, at the Department of Archaeology and Museology at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Following this, he took on the role of a Visiting Scholar at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.

In June 2022, Michael became a member of the Geography Department and the CRC1266 at Kiel. In 2023, he achieved a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) post-doctoral fellowship for his project titled EXOCHAINS – Exploring Holocene Climate Change and Human Innovations across Eurasia. This project is situated at the Universities of Basel (Quaternary Geology, Department of Environmental Sciences) and Cambridge (Environmental Systems Analysis, Department of Geography).

Currently, Michael is actively engaged in several research initiatives, including the examination of paleoclimate and human mobility across Eurasia, conducting stable isotope analyses in both archaeological and ecological contexts, and employing computational methods to better understand past human behaviors. His primary areas of expertise encompass multivariate statistics, spatial analysis, and computational modeling within the fields of geography and archaeology.