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## Turi King and the Genetics Team
The DNA analysis at the heart of the identification was led by Turi King, a geneticist at the University of Leicester who specialized in the intersection of genetics and genealogy. King had spent her career working on questions at the boundary between genetic science and historical inquiry — questions about how DNA can illuminate genealogical relationships, population histories, and the identities of historical individuals.
Her role in the Richard III project combined the technical work of ancient DNA extraction and sequencing with the genealogical research needed to identify appropriate living comparators, and the statistical work of synthesizing multiple lines of evidence into a coherent probabilistic assessment. The Nature Communications paper she led brought together researchers from genetics, archaeology, and historical studies, reflecting the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of the identification task.
King’s work on the project involved obtaining the skeletal samples, establishing the laboratory protocols needed to minimize contamination, sequencing the mitochondrial genome from the ancient DNA, sequencing the relevant portions of the nuclear genome for appearance markers, and conducting the comparison against the reference samples provided by Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig.
The genealogical work was conducted in collaboration with Kevin Schürer, a historian at the University of Leicester who had expertise in genealogical reconstruction across multiple generations. Schürer’s contribution was to independently trace the second line of descent — the lineage that led to Wendy Duldig — using documentary sources. This second line served as an independent check on the identification: a researcher who had not been involved in the work on the Ibsen lineage found a different living descendant through different genealogical pathways and reached a compatible result.