Beth Shapiro | |
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_(cropped).jpg) Shapiro in 2010 | |
| Born | Beth Alison Shapiro 1976 (age 47–48) Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
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| Known for | How to Clone a Mammoth[4] |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
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| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Inferring evolutionary history and processes using ancient DNA (2003) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alan J. Cooper[3] |
| Website | pgl |
Beth Alison Shapiro (born 1976[5]) is an American evolutionary molecular biologist. She is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.[6] Shapiro's work has centered on the analysis of ancient DNA.[7][2] She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009[5][8] and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2006.[1]
Shapiro was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania on January 14, 1976.[9][10] She grew up in Rome, Georgia, where she served as a local news presenter while attending Rome High School.[11]
She graduated from Rome High School with a GPA of 4.0, and entered the University of Georgia in 1994.[12] She studied Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English literature, and geology prior to choosing ecology as her major.[10] She graduated summa cum laude in 1999 with BA and MA degrees in ecology.[10][5] The same year, she was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship[11] followed by a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford for research on inferring evolutionary history and processes using ancient DNA supervised by Alan J. Cooper.[3]
Shapiro was appointed a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Oxford in 2004.[13] The same year she was appointed director of the Henry Wellcome Biomolecules Centre at Oxford, a position she held until 2007. In 2006, she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.[1] While at the Biomolecules Centre, Shapiro carried out mitochondrial DNA analysis of the dodo.[14][15]
Shapiro's research on ecology has been published in leading journals[2] including Molecular Biology and Evolution,[16] PLOS Biology,[17] Science[14][18][19] and Nature.[20][21][22] In 2007, she was named by Smithsonian Magazine as one of 37 young American innovators under the age of 36.[23]
Her peer reviewed publications in scientific journals[2] and books include:
