Beth Shapiro

Alison Beth Shapiro (born 14 January 1976) is an American evolutionary biologist.

Life

First Shapiro studied ecology at the University of Georgia ( Master's degree in 1999 ). In 1999 she won a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford University, where she received her doctorate in 2003 and distinguished himself as a specialist in the research field of ancient DNA. According to DNA studies of mammoths that had been found in Beringia, attracted especially the extraction of fragments of the legendary Dodo scientific attention and public interest. You and a team of researchers, it was until 2002 the first time succeeded in a project in 2000 to isolate from the claws - bones of a 300 year old specimen from the collections of the Natural History Museum of the University of Oxford tiny pieces of DNA. The DNA comparison showed a close relationship to the also extinct Rodrigues solitaire and still living East Asian airworthy Nicobar Pigeon ( Caloenas nicobarica ).

She developed biostatistical methods to reconstruct the population dynamics of extinct or endangered animal species from the gene sequences of samples. She turned to the for example, polar bears and studied environmental influences on the population. In addition, they studied with similar methods, the development of a population of RNA viruses in human patients.

Shapiro was director of " Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre ", the " Department of Zoology " University of Oxford, where he was Wellcome Trust and Royal Society Research Fellow. In 2007, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2009 she was MacArthur Fellow.

Swell

• Richard Friebe: Related Dodos - Story in New Window, March 1, 2002
• DNA yields dodo family secrets - BBC News, February 28, 2002