[3] In 2022, he was appointed to the Comité Scientifique International du Musée d’Anthropologie Préhistorique de Monaco[4] and the Pontifical Academy of Science.

He completed this program in 1994 and earned a Ph.D. in paleoanthropology through the Laboratory of Paleontology at Pierre and Marie Curie University and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris in 1998.

Only one small piece of Selam's skeleton was found in 2000; it would take an additional six years for her to be fully extracted and analyzed before preliminary results were published in Nature in 2006.

In 2004 Alemseged moved back to Europe and became a senior researcher in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Alemseged stayed with the Max Planck Institute until 2008, at which point he became the Curator and Irvine Chair of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

In contrast to these relatively sparse finds, not only was the DRP team able to recover Selam's complete skull, but also a sandstone impression of her brain and even the hyoid bone.

Usually paleoanthropologists struggle to reassemble fragmentary skeletal finds so as to place them back together, but Alemseged faced the exact opposite situation with Selam.

This extraordinary ancient skeleton preserves a mosaic of features shared by both humans and the apes and clearly shows that both the anatomy and behavior of our ancestors was changing, slowly but progressively.

The DRPAlemseged's research interests lie in the discovery and analysis of new hominin and non-human primate fossils, with emphasis on the link between morphological changes over time and environmental transformations.

This multidisciplinary project undertakes field research on sediments spanning in age from about 4.0 million to less than 500,000 years ago and addresses some of the major questions in paleoanthropology.

The Pliocene site of Dikika, in Ethiopia, from which the project derives its name, is uniquely suited to answering these questions due to its strategic chronological placement.

Asbole on the other hand, another site studied by the DRP, represents the Middle Pleistocene, a time period that is poorly understood in the region.

Th multidisciplinary approach by the California Academy of Sciences to the biogeography of the region facilitates the study of the full spectrum of Africa's natural history and its vital role as the birthplace of mankind.