Prof. Dr. Patrick Roberts

As Director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation, Patrick is committed to pioneering and applying multidisciplinary approaches to studying long-term relationships of our species and the Earth system. Combining fieldwork, diverse laboratory methods, and modelling approaches, Patrick aims to develop ‘usable’ quantitative and qualitative insights from the past to inform pressing contemporary challenges.

Patrick focuses on developing new methodologies which can be used to study how urban dynamics, trajectories, and networks (and their alternatives) have interacted with land use changes and, in turn, different parts of the Earth system across space and time. He co-founded the URBank network as a new, open access data hub designed to transform how we understand and study urbanism over its 5500 year history. As leader of the PANTROPOCENE ERC project, Patrick also developed a pioneering framework for incorporating historical, archaeological, and palaeoecological data within Earth system modelling frameworks to explore the feedbacks of different forms of land use and the planet.

Patrick’s work combines state-of-the-art approaches in field- and lab-based archaeological science, remote sensing, palaeoecology, history, computational archaeology, and land use modelling. He has led diverse fieldwork projects in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Brazil for the past decade, with ongoing projects also in Germany, China, Australia, Cambodia, Colombia, Armenia, and Argentina. Patrick’s work has been funded through two ERC grants, as well as DFG, AHRC, BMBF and National Geographic funding. Patrick is also a PI within the Imaginamics Cluster of Excellence.

Patrick has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and published one academic (Tropical Forests in Human Prehistory, History, and Modernity - OUP) and one popular (Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped the World and Us - Penguin/Random House) book focused on the significance of human history in the latitudinal tropics for understanding the origins of contemporary human–Earth system dynamics. He was recently listed as one of the top-cited archaeologists in the world (Scholar GPS, 2025). Patrick’s innovative transdisciplinary approach has been recognised through numerous scientific (e.g. Thüringer Forschungspreis, Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis) awards.

Patrick is committed to outreach, engagement, and capacity building in the places where he works. This has included close collaboration with Indigenous communities, with the Veddah Indigenous Community awarding him their highest humanitarian award in 2023. He is also active in science communication with interviews, participation in public discussion fora and a leading role within the Voices of the Global South initiative.

Prior to his directorship, Patrick led the isoTROPIC permanent Independent Research Group at the institute and acted as Lead Scientist of the Department of Archaeology prior to its conclusion at the end of 2024. In these roles, Patrick has invested significant time in stepping in to support students from the former Department of Archaeology, ensuring successful thesis enrollments, supervision, and graduation at German universities including the University of Tübingen, University of Cologne, and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. His isoTROPIC Research Group also made major contributions to the fieldwork and laboratory facilities now available for the institute while also forming close collaborations across the institute which came to fruition in the form of cross-institutional publications.