Tigrai Academy

According to CRUX, Pope Francis has appointed Stanley B. Prusiner, an American neurologist and Nobel Prize laureate in medicine, and Zeresenay Alemseged, a Tigrayan-American paleoanthropologist who discovered the fossilized remains of the “world’s oldest child,” to be members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The pope also appointed Emilce Cuda, an Argentine theologian and secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the Vatican said on April 13.

The Tigrayan-American world-class professor, Zeresenay Alemseged, who studies the origin and evolution of early human ancestors, is a professor at the University of Chicago. His fieldwork in Ethiopia led to finding the nearly complete fossilized remains of the “world’s oldest child” — a 3.3 million-year-old human ancestor belonging to the same extinct hominin species as “Lucy,” the nickname of one of the most well-known human ancestor fossils.