Brigitte Pakendorf (born 1970)[1] is a South African linguist and geneticist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
[3] This second thesis brought together her interests in dealing with contact in the prehistory of the Sakha, or Yakuts, from both linguistic and genetic perspectives.
[3][4] From 2006 to 2012 Pakendorf was leader of a Max Planck Society junior research group on comparative population linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Jena.
In 2012 she took up a position as senior researcher (DR2) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in the laboratory Dynamique du langage (Language dynamics).
Pakendorf's research is interdisciplinary, bridging biology, anthropology and linguistics.