Christina Warinner is Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and she leads international research groups 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 is a member of the Microbiology faculty at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, and she is the President of the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology. 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.
Warinner 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 has published two books (Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany and Ancient Maya Color) and more than 70 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, Nature Genetics, Chemical Reviews, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Current Biology, Nature Communications, Current Anthropology, Latin American Antiquity, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, and the Journal of Archaeological Science.
She is 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. Her ancient microbiome findings were named among the top 100 scientific discoveries of 2014 by Discover Magazine, and her research on medieval women artists was named one of the top 10 archaeological discoveries of 2019 by Archaeology Magazine. She was named one of the Top 10 Scientists Ready to Transform Their Field in 2017 by Science News, and her research has been featured in more than a hundred news articles and programs, including stories in the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Scientific American, Archaeology Magazine, NPR’s Science Friday, the New Scientist, the Guardian, the Observer, WIRED UK, and CNN, among others.
Warinner has been an invited speaker for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of London, and the British Academy, and her TED Talks have been viewed more than 2 million times. She is passionate about public education and outreach, and she designed the Dairy Cultures exhibit at the Natural History of Mongolia and co-created the Introduction to Ancient Metagenomics Summer School, which has educated more than 100 aspiring early career scientists from 18 countries. She has been featured in documentaries produced by PBS NOVA, Netflix, and the genome sequencing company Illumina, and her research on ancient Nepal appears in the award-winning children’s book, Secrets of the Sky Caves. 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.