Christina Warinner

Christina Warinner is Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She specializes in the analysis of ancient DNA and proteins, and her research focuses on the study of ancient biomolecules to better understand past human diet, health, and the evolution of the human microbiome. She has conducted groundbreaking studies on the evolution and changing ecology of the human oral microbiome, including reconstructing the oldest microbiome to date from a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal, and she has published extensively on prehistoric migrations, the origins and spread of dairy pastoralism, and the biodiversity of the human gut microbiome. She is the President of the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA), and the recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s Exemplary Cross-Fields Award, the Federation of European Microbiological Societies Article Award, and the Shanghai Archaeological Forum Research Award. She serves on the Leadership Team of the Max Planck – Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, the Program Board of the American School for Prehistoric Research, and the Board of Directors of the American Center for Mongolian Studies, and she leads international research teams at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology in Jena, Germany. She has been an invited speaker for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the British Academy, and her TED Talks have been viewed more than 2 million times. In addition to her research, she is passionate about public education and outreach, and she created the Adventures in Archaeological Science coloring book, now available in more than sixty languages, including many indigenous and underrepresented languages. She is engaged in the open science movement, and her research group has been actively involved in improving scholarly communication, data sharing, and research transparency.