Lounes Chikhi is a population geneticist interested in humans and endangered species. He tries to understand the properties of population genetic data to determine what can be said or what perhaps should not be said about the recent evolutionary history of species, including humans. He is a Senior CNRS researcher (Directeur de Recherche) in Toulouse, France and the Principal Investigator of the Population and Conservation Genetics group at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal. After completing his PhD between Paris, Montpellier, and Sète, France, and Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he moved to Padua, Italy as a Marie Curie Fellow to work with Prof. Guido Barbujani. With Guido, he started to work on the Neolithic transition, among others and moved to London where he worked at the Institute of Zoology, at Queen Mary and Westfield College, and at University College London, with people like Mike Bruford, Mark Beaumont, Benoit Goossens, Richard Nichols, David Goldstein, Mark Thomas and Ziheng Yang, among others. People to whom he owes a lot for mentorship, scientific integrity, and friendship. He then joined the CNRS in Toulouse in 2002 and the IGC in 2005, where he has remained since. He has been interested in genetic drift and structured populations for more than two decades, and is convinced that many signals identified in the genetic data might be caused to a large extent by our inability to account properly for population structure. This includes selection, population size changes and admixture signals. He has over 150 scientific contributions, including 115+ peer-reviewed articles, 20+ book chapters and ten popular science articles.