Beth A. Shapiro

Biosketch

Beth Shapiro, DPhil, is Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. She earned her BS and MS in Ecology from the University of Georgia in 1999 and her DPhil in Zoology from Oxford University in 2003. She was formerly a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Director of the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at Oxford University, as well as both a Professor and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the AAAS, and the California Academy of Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She has been named a Searle Scholar, Packard Fellow, National Geographic Explorer, and MacArthur Fellow. She has served as President of the American Genetics Association and on editorial boards including Science and Molecular Biology and Evolution, and is author of the award-winning books “How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction” (Princeton University Press 2015, 2020) and “Life As We Made It” (Basic Books 2021).

Research Interests

Dr. Shapiro's research focuses on paleogenomics and conservation genomics, using ancient and environmental DNA to understand evolutionary responses to climate change and inform conservation strategies. Her work involves developing laboratory methods for recovering trace amounts of degraded DNA from challenging substrates including preserved organismal remains and sediments and pioneering techniques DNA library preparation and targeted capture approaches. In parallel, her group develops computational tools that leverage temporal information in ancient DNA sequences to infer demographic processes, detect hybridization events, and reconstruct population size changes. Her methodological expertise extends to rapidly-evolving RNA viruses, where she has developed phylogenetic approaches to estimate evolutionary rates and viral demographic histories. Through comparative genomic analyses of extinct megafauna including mammoths, cave bears, and horses, her research investigates mechanisms underlying population dynamics, local adaptation, and extinction risk. Current work includes developing genomic tools for species conservation and applying paleogenomic insights to predict modern species' responses to rapid environmental change.